More links about the opposition between ludologists and narrativists, ‘real stuff’ and ‘lore’

The opposition between these two can be compared to some other traditional oppositions, like the opposition between the ‘real’ rules of the game and what we used to call ‘chrome’ elements (stuff which adds ‘feel’ but doesn’t change how the game ‘works’), or the opposition between the ‘real’ stuff (the stuff that affords or is obdurate to player intention) and the ‘lore’ (‘Lore, what is it good for? absolutely nothing…’).  Here’s some excerpted stuff from this article

“This disagreement has been called the ludology vs. narratology debates. The narratological view is that games should be understood as novel forms of narrative and can thus be studied using theories of narrative (Murray, 1997; Atkins, 2003). The ludological position is that games should be understood on their own terms. Ludologists have proposed that the study of games should concern the analysis of the abstract and formal systems they describe. In other words, the focus of game studies should be on the rules of a game, not on the representational elements which are only incidental (Aarseth, 2001; Eskelinen, 2001; Eskelinen, 2004).”

And as usual, Greg Costikyan, who has been a designer of every known kind of game and is an unusually observant parrticipant, discusses this again in this article (excerpt):

“The Clash of Games and Stories

Almost from the inception of “games with stories,” there has been an ongoing culture clash between those who view story as perhaps important but tangential to understanding the nature of games, and those who view it as essential. In 1977, the Game Manufacturer’s Association (GAMA), a group of publishers of board wargames, tabletop RPGs, and other non-digital games aimed at an enthusiast audience, officially decided to name their industry the “adventure gaming industry” (something that later caused confusion for fans of text and graphic adventures). This decision was bitterly contested by some members of GAMA, including those companies whose main business was the publication of wargames; they did not see how Third Reich or Napoleon at Waterloo could remotely be called “adventure games.” Redmond Simonsen,
Not incidentally, the man who coined the term “game designer.”3 then art director for SPI, a major wargame publisher, proposed “simulation games” as an alternative – but this proposition was soundly defeated.

The clash between those who viewed games as formal systems and those who viewed them as storytelling media persisted with the rise of digital games; if you view the program of any Game Developers Conference (or before it, the Computer Game Developers Conference), you will find panels or presentations debating the role of stories in games. You can even identify the proponents of opposing views clearly: Chris Crawford
Paradoxically, since Crawford is now embarked on a quixotic attempt to develop what he views as true interactive fiction – which he nonetheless insists must be distinct from and quite different from “games.”4 and Dan Bunten in the “games as systems” camp, and Hal Barwood and Mark Barrett on the “games as story” side.”

And here is what Greg Costikyan has to say specifically about MMOs (is he right?) Note how the ‘real stuff’ versus the irrelevant ‘chrome’ or ‘lore’ keeps cropping up as an opposition.

MMOs

The line of descent from tabletop RPGs to massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) is clear – both have character design systems, elaborate variations in equipment, skills, and spells, and in both cases most games in these genres are built around killing monsters and taking their treasure, with a consequent advance in character power.

While tabletop RPGs have, over time, evolved more toward true role-playing and the telling of stories, MMOs are almost devoid of story. That’s because these are “never-ending games”: story ultimately depends on change, and players cannot be permitted to make real and meaningful changes to the game world.

Why is that? Imagine that an MMO comes to some sort of story climax, which could go either way, depending on the actions of the players. The live team must develop content to handle both outcomes. And on some servers, the event will go one way, and on others, the other. Suddenly, you have a fork in the game world – and your new content development problem is now compounded by the need to develop different new content for the two different worlds on an ongoing basis.

MMOs often claim to have stories: the manual might have badly written sword-and-sorcery at the front, and each new content update is supposed to “advance the story” in some fashion. But by and large, players don’t give a crap about this; they’re interested in the new content, new monsters, new areas to explore – but whatever supposed connection to an ongoing story is involved is irrelevant to the way they play. That there’s a story is a conceit of the developers; it has no impact on actual play.

Interestingly, however, MMOs intersect with story in another fashion – via quests, which I’ll discuss later.

In essence, MMOs are “story settings” – but have almost lost the connection to story in exchange for becoming good social environments as well as good games.”

But these MMO games do have stories ‘embedded‘  within them: quests, according to GC:

“Embedded Stories

One way is to embed stories in the game, rather than the game in a story. We saw this with Tales of the Arabian Nights: mini-stories told in the course of an encompassing board game. But we can see it today also in the quests of MMOs. A player encounters an NPC, is told the background of a story, is given a task to accomplish, does so, and returns for a reward (and quite often the next step in a story consisting of several quests). In the course of a character’s career in an MMO, he may play through dozens, even hundreds of these mini-stories – and at least when they are well-written and implemented, they can be entertaining and greatly increase the appeal of playing. Indeed, the excellence of its quest system is one of World of Warcraft’s greatest strengths.

Each of these mini-stories may itself be linear, but they are encountered by different players in different orders, so each player’s experience is different. Moreover, since these stories are small, their individual development cost is also small, and there’s no need to ensure that all players are exposed to all content – increasing repeat playability, something you basically don’t get with any linear game.

It’s a technique that can clearly be taken to game styles other than MMOs and board games – and an obvious area for designers to explore.

In another post, I (Paul Manning) been arguing that we do see distinctive narrative patterns emergent from what you could call the ‘core design’ which affords kinds of narratives or stories that are different for each game (these are often memorialized in machinima, another kind of narrative genre), and this is not quite the same as the putative stories (‘lore’) that Roleplayers love but no one else cares about because ‘they don’t have impact on the game’.   In Tabletop RPGs, this hard distinction between ‘game’ and ‘chrome’/'lore’ is not in evidence because the game master can make lore ‘real in its consequences.  But anything that doesn’t produce real consequences, affordances or obduracies, for players in an MMO can be relegated to the ‘lore’ category.   This binary distinction is real for a lot of players, but for some players, aesthetic things, like a cool power whose animations look stupid, for example, have real consequences.  Anyway, this opposition between kinds of stories seems like one worth attending to, it is part of the endogenous meanings produced by the game setting.  Each player is sometimes more of a ludologist (a power gamer, for example, is an indigenous ludologist), and more of a narrativist (roleplayers, for example, are more of indigenous narrativists), and usually a mix.  But the opposition here is what we call an ‘antinomy’, an antinomy is a pair of views which logically exclude each other, but for either of which you can construct an entirely valid and logical argument.  It’s not a matter of ‘who is right’, but that game play, game practice, is generated in the space of this antinomy, at any given moment, a player may be more instrumentally attending to the rules, or more aesthetically attending to the lore.  It’s something to explore.