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Thu Feb 12 15:43:08 2004
Hi Ian, Great to talk to you at the gaming conference and the dinner afterwards. Here is my paper on narrative -- http://cogweb.ucla.edu/crp/Papers/Steen_Narrative.html I enjoyed your thinking on how to turn Little Red Riding Hood into a computer game -- the exercise would be a useful one for understanding what it is that a narrative teaches, what types of information are left implicit (this is one of my themes in the paper above), and how the singularity of the narrative thread explored in a fairy tale implies a whole series of untold narratives. [In the following, I go on for a while elaborating on our conversation -- not what I had intended to do, but it seemed a fruitful place to start so I'll run with it a bit -- I'd enjoy your comments. I'm also cc'ing this to Elaine Chan -- I told her I will be teaching a graduate seminar on Learning from Play in the spring, and it would be great if you could both participate -- keep me posted; I'll send you a syllabus as requested, Elaine.] For instance, in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, one untold narrative is the case in which the wolf attacks the little girl when he first encounters her. In this narrative, he probably can't prevent her from screaming, and her scream will most likely be heard by the woodsmen, who will likely come to her aid and threaten the wolf with axes -- at which point he could be pacified and perhaps reformed, or injured and perhaps killed, or he makes his sorry escape, as hungry as before. In another narrative, the man Little Red Riding Hood encounters on a forest path is a kind gentleman who befriends the girl because of her trusting demeanor and later on provides her in turn with some vital favor; or he turns out to be the girl's mother's long-lost brother who is preparing a wonderful surprise for them all. Along these narrative threads is a variant were Little Red Riding Hood refuses to speak with the stranger, and later is stuck because he is not there to help her. In other fairy tales, some of these alternatives are typically acted out by the main protagonist's less fortunate siblings. In Little Red Riding Hood, they are tacit, and by backgrounding them, by not telling them, the focus is retained on the singular story of the little girl and her disasterous mistake; the rest of the phase space is left unexplored, and thus marked as territory that is perhaps too costly to explore, or simply not likely to be critically important and therefore not worth the effort. It is these untold narratives that would need to be built into a game. In this sense, computer games provide a technology for the explicit exploration of a possibility space that literary narratives explore only implicitly. It's not given of course that such an explicit exploration is superior; it may be that the power of folding untold narratives into itself is not only a central part of the power of a literary, sequential narrative, but is also cognitively more effective. Video games might lead you to explore possibility spaces -- or narrative paths -- that are less likely to be fruitful. I argue that learning from play is structured as strategy learning (cf. http://cogweb.ucla.edu/crp/Papers/Steen_Owens_2001.html). A singular narrative that folds other narratives into itself, backgrounding them and assuming them without actually exploring them, would seem to lend itself to the task of conveying a single, highly effective strategy. In this sense, narrative is a better vehicle for the generational transfer of strategies through play. Video games, in contrast, by the simple fact of leaving the next move in the hands of the player, must allow the player to elaborate a wide range of possible actions, each explored along its own narrative path. Such paths could each reach a final endpoint, and practicing along each path would lead to the development or crystallization of a particular strategy. At the end of playing along several such paths, the player will have a far broader sense of the different strategies that may be effective. Alternatively, games can be designed where learning is cumulative, where strategies successfully carried out at one point doesn't lead to a return to the initial starting point, but to a higher level in the game, where the ability to act is enhanced. This enlarges the phase space within the game still further, and thus expands the range of possible strategies that could be acquired. Since video gamers typically make strategic choices on their own, without the supervision of or without even being in the presence of a generational mentor, it might look like the strategies they develop and thus learn typically are not and cannot easily be part of a generational transfer. Certainly, a parent cannot easily modulate a video game to suit the child's developmental moment, or the parent's own assessment of which strategies are the preferred ones, in the way that a parent can modulate a story. However, for each of the narrative threads that a game gives the player an opportunity to explore, the game designers and programmers have built into the game a series of contraints that effectively limit the strategies that will be successful. These constraints play a role in the game that parallels the constraints of a singular narrative path. Each of a game's multiple paths are themselves structured as individual narratives, each scenario has its own logic, built into the structure of the game as much as a particular outcome is built into the structure of a narrative. In the story of Little Red Riding Hood, it is a given that the stranger, the wolf, is bad -- bad in a gutteral, instinctive sense that implies someone who is out to kill you and eat you, or more metaphorically in the sense of someone who will decrease your fitness in some other way, for instance by seducing and then abandoning you. In one of the sequences of the Little Red Riding Hood game, the stranger does turn out to be bad in just the same manner, but the task of determining whether he is bad is brought to the fore by introducing alternative scenarios, backgrounded in the fairy tale, in which the stranger is a potential friend and benefactor. As we discussed, one might imagine a game with several levels, each appropriate to a certain age. At Level A, the wolf is always bad, and what he wants is to eat you. At level B, the stranger is not always a wolf, and sometimes he is a friend whose help is vital further into the game. At level C, the stranger could be your future husband or a seducer who abandons you. Each of these narratives would create a scenario in which certain actions will lead to failure and others to success. By understanding the relevant variables, the player would develop successful strategies to deal with each scenario. Some games, such as online multiplayer games, create simulated worlds that introduce new orders of freedom to the player. For instance, in these games you may not be confronted with a friend or an adversary, as is the pattern of literary narratives. Instead, you may be placed, virtually, in an environment where you are under several simultaneous and paced constraints. You may be informed, for instance, that you are hungry, with an indicator showing how much time you have to solve the problem of getting food and eating. That problem, in turn, may have a large number of solutions, and it is up to you to explore one or more of these solutions. At the same time, you may be informed that you need to sleep, or that your money is running out, or that you are getting sick. Each problem can be addressed by a potentially large range of strategies. These games are not without precedent, but the forerunner is not found in literary narratives. Rather, the forerunning is in the loosely structured social role play that forms a core part of children's spontaneous play (for an example, see for instance David F. Lancy's Playing on the Mother-Ground, which has a chapter on social role play in a Kpelle village in West Africa). I have in mind games like playing family, where issues of personal relationship, individual needs, and raising children are explored and practiced. The conceptual work accomplished in these types of games is very different: multiple dimensions must be optimized simultaneously or on a rotating basis, success requires continuous multitasking rather than a sustained focus on a singular goal. Perhaps we could pick up the conversation on games at this point -- I'd like to hear what Elaine has to say too. A critical question is that of motivation. In the case of narrative games, whether you have a series of parallel narratives or a helix of cumulative strategy acquisitions, the motivating factor is the problem itself: the encounter with the wolf, modeling the other's mind, telling friend from foe, acting at the right time and in the right way. In order to focus attention on a particular challenge, a particular problem, the narrative game elides the continuity of experience into a succession of highlights, taking for granted and known the full dimensionality of living. These games are the oldest and the most primitive: games of chase and fighting, structured around high-stakes adversarial encounters. At the same time, narratives have continued to develop into vastly complex novels; some of these begin to look like lived worlds. It would be interesting to consider the types of cognitive challenges generated within the different types of games. I had also intended to discuss the structuring of online worlds in terms of social modeling: a striking feature of the Sims Online, for instance, is the incentive structure of the game, and the potential conflict between this structure and people's social psychology. It will have to be for another time -- this is already way too long. Let me know if you might be open to joining my grad seminar in spring; it would be great to explore the intersection of narrative, play, and computer game design. Best wishes, Francis F. Steen, Ph.D. |