Towards a Common Language: A Theorization of Text, Audio, and Image in Videogame Narrative
Creators: name: Keever, Justin
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2015

description: The mention of the videogame medium in academic disciplines outside the realm of game studies tends (for this writer, anyway) to inspire excitement and dread in equal measure. The former would seem to derive from an appropriately childish desire to sit at the adult’s table of academia, as it were: long has there been discussion of what games have borrowed from the media that have come before, and little of the reverse. The latter feeling is based in the fear that the term “videogame” would appear, as it did for years, in a negative connotation. Not in the archaic media/sociological studies sense (i.e. the tired question of videogame violence and its correlation to aggression in players), but merely in the sense that the videogame medium is perceived either as a lesser art form, or perhaps as not an art form at all. It’s with these preconceived aspirations and worries I approached Thomas Eslaesser’s Chapter on the “Mind-Game Film” in his book Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, a text that was published in March of 2009. In this Chapter, Elsaesser cites a school of thought in modern film narrative analysis which posits that “mind-game films [are] leftovers of classical narrative, during a period of transition, when the default value of cinematic storytelling is rapidly becoming that of the interactive video-game and the computer simulation game”. Elsaesser continues by claiming that this assertion “should certainly leave the theoretician dissatisfied,” explaining that “the literature on whether games are narratives at all, or need to be seen as an entirely different species, is vast and vastly divided…”. Here, Eslaesser has provided game academics with a much-needed outsider’s perspective: Twelve years after Janet Murray wrote a book on the topic of interactive narratives, eight years after the supposed “Year One” of Game Studies (Aarseth), six years after Gonzalo Frasca claimed both that games are resolutely not narrative and that the debate between narratology and ludology didn’t actually occur (Simulation versus Narrative; Ludologists Love Stories), and 5 years after Espen Aarseth’s “Genre Trouble,” game studies still had not offered a definitive answer as to whether or not games can be understood via narrative theory. This lack of resolution creates the image of a house divided: a medium that persons from outside disciplines can only approach with a measured uncertainty at best. This inconsistency obviously manifests itself in the myriad definitions of videogame: compare, for example, Jesper Juul’s six formal features of the videogame – Rules; Variable, Quantifiable Outcome; Values assigned to possible outcomes; Player Effort; Player attached to outcome; and Negotiable Consequences – to Geoff Howland’s five elements: Graphics, Sound, Interface, Gameplay, Story (Game Player World; 1998). Even the exact spelling of “videogame” is left undecided: is it “video game,” as Mark JP Wolf refers to it in his book The Medium of the Video Game? Or is it the “videogame” that James Newman and Grant Tavinor refer to in their work? Or is it the medium of the “video-game” that Elsaesser speaks of? These kinds of inconsistencies are not the growing-pains of a new academic discipline: commercial videogames have existed for over forty years, and scholarship on videogames has been written since before the supposed “Year One” of academic game studies thirteen years ago. This is a problem.