As I was reading an article on Wired about "A Mean Storytelling Machine" I was wondering whether computer games were becoming the prime storytellers of our time and what the implications of this development were. Some cursory observations can be made:
- The player does not gain significantly in interactivity. Most computer games are still very much linear: the player does not have much chance of changing the outcome of the story. His role is still very much that of reading, if we refer to Barthes' (1974) idea of the readerly text: beating a linear path through the text. The fact that this linearity is obscured by positioning the player inside the story only adds to the readerly character of the text: the player is discouraged from interpretation and construction of alternative meanings, because he himself is a part of the story. A character can not at the same time act and be detached from his actions, he must choose one position. The story is in it's essence a mythical one (as understood by Benjamin (1991) and Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/2004)): the subjectivity of the player is an infernal repetition of acts that have bee pre-constructed. Like the mythical figures in the Odyssey the characters in the video game are doomed to constantly repeat the same actions: whether it is Guybrush Threepwood re-enacting his stupidity or the main character of a first person shooter compulsively destroying ever same foes - all differences between them ones of quantity, not quality (stronger weapons, tougher armour, new abilities).
- The change is rather one of identification than of interactivity. Brecht's epic theatre aimed at preventing the viewer to identify with the characters by stereotyping them. Identification, which Brecht saw as a trait of bourgeois art, was to be abandoned in favour of ideas - his characters are more than anything else allegories. Mack the knife is not a petty criminal, he represents petty criminalness. In this sense he is as mythological as any character from a video game, compulsively repeating the same patterns of behaviour as if enchanted: even as he is chased by the police and must know that the brothel will be the first place they look, he can not refrain from visiting it, even after he has been betrayed by the prostitutes at an earlier time. Computer games share this trait of stereotyping, but the position of the player is such that the player is embedded in the narrative structure, complete identification being the sine qua non of the game. In this sense computer games are returning to a pre-bourgeois era of storytelling, to that of myth.
- If, as Benjamin (1991, 439) notes, the essence of storytelling is "the ability to exchange experiences," computer games can be said to free storytelling from experience. They do not re-present experiences as they have already happened (as with the traveller, the prime example of the early storyteller, whose credibility was dependant on actually visiting the places he was giving accounts of), but have the ability to create experiences on the spot. The trend is clear: ever more realistic graphics combined with force feedback interface devices (one can even get a force feedback vest for first person shooters if one is not satisfied with a vibrating mouse) work towards replacing experience, mimicking it perfectly, not recounting it. Games tend towards constructing experience, not merely exchanging it.
References:
Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang.
Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Gesammelte Schriften, Band II, 2: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 1947/2004. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
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