Mechanic and narrative
[caption id=“attachment_675” align=“alignleft” width=“256”] Dealing with fuzzy concepts - CC image by Daniela Vladimirova[/caption]
I’ve been provoked into further theorising. Sean Kelly gave a very thorough response in the comments to my last games and narrative post, and I want to follow up. He brought up a lot of technical challenges to a ‘clear delineation between mechanic and narrative’, proposing that there are narratives that can be expressed in some form other than the rule set, and rule sets that can be re-interpreted with different narrative effects. If I interpreted his questions correctly, at root is this problem: if mechanic is not sufficient for narrative, why should it matter? And if it is sufficient, isn’t the term ‘narrative’ being applied too broadly?
All systems have narratives, but all of narrative can’t be found in the system structure itself. I think that to get something more out of study of existing games, not only do you need to look at the other forms of expression within the product as designed and marketed, but also at the conversations surrounding the game’s creation and reception, and ideally, at related conversations, and the networks of communication that connect these forms of communication. Narratives are overtaken - they aren’t created in a vacuum, and ideally, if we had unlimited research time, we would never assume that we understand the real narrative significance of any sign or object to the readers in question, unless we had investigated their meaning from a range of other sources. Personally I’d like to use semantic domain analysis as a tool in this task.
Over-reliance on re-skinning without changing mechanics to optimise narrative expression is, at the very least, lazy, and at worst it’s perilous to the quality of a design. A better understanding of how mechanics contribute to storytelling would reduce the need to use cut-scenes to beat players over the head with your narrative intentions, and perhaps it would aid what is, in my entirely subjective opinion, a much-needed transition: from an artificial translation of curvilinear storylines into game format, towards really skillful development of database narratives for a medium that already possesses database qualities.
Are my definitions fuzzy? Yes. I’m treating narrative as a matter of concern rather than a stable, observable object of scientific inquiry, and I think that’s appropriate. Nevertheless, Sean’s comment did make me want to offer a note of clarification on what I think narrative is.
Narrative exists where systems are conceived - in their narration, as in the example I gave of the imagined medical textbooks, and in their construction, as in the design of a game or an operating system. An artificial distinction could be drawn up here between narratives of description and narratives of construction, which intuitively seem very separate - one exists in languages, the other in designs.
But this distinction would get a whole lot blurrier when going back to look at the act of designing a system, which synthesises communications in a range of languages. On top of that, I’d want to come back to my first point about narrative being overtaken - even if the design of mechanics were a discrete activity separate to communication, it would still be heavily influenced by the communicative activities that are less controversially accepted as transmitters of narrative. And then to even further muddy the waters, programming is linguistic and languages possess mechanics - and those mechanics are partly constructed post-hoc by linguists who need to explain systems that exist dynamically and are ordinarily tacit, leading us to descriptions of constructions of descriptions.
To bring this back to something less vague; I don’t think that your empirical question should be ‘can narrative be translated from mechanics to other media?’ The precision comes from measuring all the forms of expression surrounding your object of interest - a daunting task that will remain an aspiration against which to measure quality, rather than a realistic demand.