From Sandpit to Cinema : Charting the spectrum of Story vs Narrative.

According to popular myth, Inuit peoples (otherwise un-tactfully referred to as Eskimos) have hundreds of words for snow. Such a density of nouns in a spoken language to describe a most common element in their environment seems perfectly logical. Language driven by necessity. 

I find myself envious of such responsive language density. I don’t live in a snowy environment but I do live in a story-telling, media-rich one. It bothers me that despite the proliferation of dramatic-media around me - as snow falls about the Inuit - I still have only two words in my vocabulary for these experiences; ‘story’ and ‘narrative’. 

My media world is comprised of a multitude of dramatic forms and yet still there is only Story and Narrative to describe them. Such a binary of terms may have sufficed for movies, tv and books but my dominant choice of media experience is games and this is where the overt simplicity of Story and Narrative becomes decidedly problematic. 

It seems that in popular and common usage games are games; if it’s electronic and involves ‘play’ it’s a game. And this single word is all encompassing. This may seem well and good until one takes in the breadth of this umbrella.

Tetris, Gruan Turismo, Nintendogs, Braid, Madden NFL, Bioshock, Mass Effect and Civilisation (and a thousand iPod and mindless Facebook dittys) are all ‘games’ and yet defining and grouping them all together seems wholly dysfunctional, let alone unhelpful. To suggest that Tetris and Mass Effect have anything in common is tenuous at best. Less extreme, though no less problematic, would be a shared grouping of Graun Turismo with Civilisation.  

Genre is the solution most other media resorts too to sub-divide a broad grouping into a more useful taxonomy. Thus Schindlers List and Dumb and Dumber are both feature films and yet fit wholly divergent genres. But the usefulness of this is wafer thin, if viably applicable at all, in regard to games. Where both Schindlers List and Dumb and Dumber are both clearly feature films - made in the same way, experienced in the same way, using the same visual constructs and language through mise en scene and montage continuity - the same cannot be said of Tetrus and Mass Effect. Indeed we can well say that Schinders List and Dumb and Dumber have much more in common than do Tetrus and Mass Effect.

Traditional Game theorists may argue a shared structure of Rules and Objectives between the two, but this is no more useful than saying Boat and a Duck have a shared structure because they both float on water.

Similarly many traditional arguments (and even contemporary game enthusiasts) have often positioned games largely outside of perceived ‘passive’ story and narrative. This has lead to a range of responses - games that reject story in favour of ill-defined notions of ‘game-play’, games that use story elements as an add-on rather than a core component, or a division between the majority of games and a small subset of narrative-game. In all of these cases and their variations the issue is a lack of uniformity or a paradigm that is uniting rather than divisive.

What I intend to propose is a continuum that may allow us to consider and understand the full range of games - from Tetrus to Bioshock - in an holistic fashion that a traverses a spectrum from the Sandpit to the Cinema. The central tenet of this continuum is a clearly distinct separation of Story and Narrative.

Whilst the two words are often interchangeable in common usage, they derive from distinctly different origins and differing implications.

Narrative derives from the Latin verb narrare, meaning “to recount” and is related to the adjective ‘gnarus’, meaning “knowing” or “skilled” - in other words a Narrative is the recounting of known events by a Narrator.

So how does this compare with Story? 

Fundamentally Story lacks much of the specificity of Narrative. There are many definitions of Story that use the word Narrative - which smacks of interchangeability which we’re trying to avoid. But more open definitions use phrases such as ‘sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place’.   

In its simplest terms we might deduce that a Story is what Happens and Narrative is the Telling of what Happened.

Another perspective is that Story is flexible, capable of change, whereas a Narrative - having been authored, written and told - is more established and less changeable. 

So, for the purposes of constructing a holistic continuum these definitions are useful as they distill a functional paradigm such as below:

STORY - is the immediacy of undertaking a dramatic experience

NARRATIVE - is the mediated construct of a dramatic experience 

Or

STORY is a sequence of experienced events.

NARRATIVE is an authored structure events.

This recognition of Story and Narrative being discernibly different rather than interchangeable gives us a mechanism to inclusively, but constructively, plot a continuum between Tetris and Bioshock by judging where a ‘game’ sits on a continuum between Story and Narrative. Thus a games position on the continuum may be judged based on how much of the experience is ‘authored’ and how much of it is immediately experienced  - how much of the experience is ‘play’ and how much is ‘played through’.

Tetris is a game with a good deal of ‘story’ written by the player in the act of their game play and the immediacy of their playing - this happened and then that happened and then…  Almost nothing about Tetris (and most other puzzle games) is ‘authored’ or pre-determined beyond the rule framework itself. The game’s progression of events is dictated almost wholly by the player. Thus Tetris sits firmly at the Story end of the continuum. Its dramatic experience of tension and release is garnered through the immediacy of its undertaking.

Bioshock by contrast, is a heavily ‘authored’ experience. Despite levels of interactivity, its progression of events is pre-ordained and has been ‘scripted’. Whilst the player may make choices and chose their manner of play the fact remains that plot points invariably occur in a set and fixed order and at set and fixed timings. This is, by definition, Narration. Through this Bioshock can be placed at the NarratIve end of the continuum relying largely on authorship for experience. A mediated construct of a dramatic experience that is ‘played through’.

This holistic rubric allows for a viable analysis of a the broad diversity of games. Sports, racing and flight simulator games would all rest at the Story end of the spectrum whilst most modern RPG and FPS games would be closer to the narrative end.

To understand and articulate this continuum in a more sophisticated and informative way we can place other touchstones at the poles of the spectrum along with Story and Narrative. The binary of Mimetic and Diegetic, and a games relative position between these two, also serves as a way to understand difference between games. In classical understandings the distinction between Mimetic and Diegetic is between Showing and Telling. Thus for our spectrum; Mimetic games are shown and experienced in the moment perpetuated by self and Diegetic games are told, authored and prescribed experience users play-through; The game play and visual manifestations Tell the narrative rather than simply Show the story. 

Here again we can see Sports based games as Mimetic Stories. Simulation and strategy games are also but leaning closer towards the centre of the spectrum with some authored moments and set points of progression; for example the set historic turning point events in Civilisation and the Total War series; these are diegetically authored moments amid a mimetic game.

With FPS and RPG games such as Mass Effect, Bioshock and Metro2033 we have a distinctly diegetic narrative as opposed to mimetic story - an experience that is related, told and experienced through set progression. And if we follow the continuum further outward we encounter a very small sector of games that rely so overtly on a diegetic condition that they move away from what would traditionally be considered a game at all. Heavy Rain stands as a prime example of this; a game that has very little mimetic form and functions as distinctly didactic narrative. 

(My review and perspective on Heavy Rain - and why it fails - can be read here)

A third way to frame the poles of our spectrum is through ideas of Simulation vs Emulation. These two terms hold a range of contexts but but may be understood best through their emotional term derivations; Sympathy and Empathy. 

Sympathy with both Latin and Greek origins, is best understood as a ‘feeling with’ - compassion for or commiseration with another person. Empathy, by contrast, is a much younger term with origins in psychology from the turn of the 20th century. It embodies the ability to imagine or project oneself into another person’s position and experience their experience. 

So, to break this down into digestible chunks we might say Sympathy is a feeling and Empathy is an understanding. Sympathy had an an emotional immediacy to it, where as Empathy requires knowledge and experience built up over time to inform understanding. 

Taking these terms back to Simulation and Emulation we have a viable distinction to make in saying that Simulation provides an experience of something we are removed from. Emulation provides and experience of something we are connected to. Simulation is Immediate and Emulation is Reflective.

Gran Turismo - as a game that sits at the Mimetic Story end of the spectrum for example - Simulates the experience of race driving but it doesn’t emulate being a race driver. In playing the game I can sympathise with the experience of driving fast but I cannot empathise which requires understanding. If such a game were redesigned toward the Narrative end of the spectrum it may be invested with RPG like qualities, character development, more detailed story-lines linking races and character progression. In such a case the game would also shift from simulation to emulation. Through ‘narration’ and character the game would move from simulating race driving to emulation of a race driver. 

This is not to suggest that one end of the story-narrative spectrum is superior over the other, rather that it simply serves as a mechanism to understand what it takes to move a player/user from an simulated experience to an emulated one - from sympathy to empathy.

So…. Our continuum comprises and infinitely variable range between Mimetic Simulated Story at one end and Diegetic Emulated Narrative at the other. What is painted below is a simple info-graphic representing the spectral position of a handful of popular games plotted according to their levels of Mimetic Simulation and Diegetic Emulation.

Viewing games in such a way, and through such a prism, allows to both unify and separate a gaming taxonomy. It allows us to viably compare and contrast Tetris with Bioshock without having to problematically assume false similarities. At the same time it allows us understand and articulate that the user’s experience is not the same between such games and yet follows a consistent trajectory.