Two Roads Diverge...Or Do They?

In the short past of game criticism, there have been two, typically opposing, approaches: narratology and ludology.  Narratology is the approach that looks at video games through their narrative, much as they’d look at a book or movie’s narrative.  Ludology is literally “the study of games,” and its approach focuses on gameplay as the chief item of intrigue in games.  Since the beginning of these terms and ideas, they’ve been chiefly two different approaches practiced usually by different people, but almost never used at the same time: you either talked about the gameplay or the narrative.  This was how they were first described to me in my very first class on video games: two different ways of approaching game criticism. ¹

In industry, ludology tends to dominate.  There is a very strong sentiment that gameplay is the most important thing in creating a game.  In some books on game design, this idea is offered as "always have more gameplay than story."² This approach was the chief way of making games early on, as you can see by the negligible narrative in most early games (though there are notable exceptions).

On the other hand, narrative tends to be the focus in academia (such as it is for video games).  Most video game scholars today have a theoretical background in literature or film where there isn't even a term to indicate a focus on narrative, since the focus is so prevalent.  So it's easy to see why this focus tends to be more prevalent.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are story-heavy studios in industry and scholars that study the effects of gameplay.

Studios like Bioware have pushed the role of the story in a game well beyond what it was earlier on.  In particular, games like Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age have a very strong focus on narrative, and even their newest game, The Old Republic, is bringing a new emphasis on story into a new genre.

There are also game scholars who study the various effects of gameplay with very little attention given to the nature of the story itself.  Jane McGonigal is a revolutionary author who has studied games through a largely ludological lens.  Her main book is Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they can Change the World.  The subtitle sums up the content exactly, and the reasons she offers for both parts, making us better people and changing the world for the better, are largely about how the gameplay does so.³  There are occasional nods towards the stories told in games, but especially when she analyses games that go beyond just video games, she’s usually talking about games with virtually no narrative in a traditional sense.

The existence of two vastly different approaches is even seen in most games today.  You have periods of storytelling, often cut-scenes, and periods of gameplay where relatively little takes place in terms of story.   An example of this is when you’ve just finished a fierce boss battle, and rather than dealing the death blow within gameplay, the game seizes control and displays the end of the battle in a cut scene.   Of those games that let you strike the final blow, you often have scenes depicting extended death scenes and exposition directly following the fight.

This division is an interesting way to divide analysis, but there's been a shift away from this in the last few years, particularly among the online crowd of game journalists, reviewers, and critics.  A shift towards understanding games not by looking at just the narrative or just the gameplay, but understanding games by looking at both: how narrative empowers gameplay and how gameplay delivers narrative.  This is something happening more and more all the time, so I’ll stick to just one good example.

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw on escapistmagazine.com repeatedly states that he prefers games where story and gameplay merge seamlessly in both his video series and column.  From his biggest praise of Halo: Reach to his main argument for Bioshock’s introduction sequence being the best in gaming history, Yahtzee consistently has high praises for games that mix story and gameplay.⁴  The virtues he describes in doing this ranges from immersion to storytelling depth to allowing the player to express themselves in-game.

While this new approach isn’t something nobody has thought of, using this approach explicitly in discussions and in game design is definitely new.  What do I think of this?  Well, that’s another topic, which I hope to cover next time.

---

1. Corrinne Lewis, "Ludology & Narratology Explored," (lecture, Intro to Video Games class, Salt Lake City, UT, Spring 2011).

2. Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design (2nd Edition), (Berkeley: New Riders Press, September 24, 2009).

3. Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, (New York: Penguin Press Group, January 20, 2011).

4. Ben Croshaw, "Extra Punctuation: Interactivity," The Escapist, March 9, 2010, Accessed: November 30, 2011, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/7268-Extra-Punctuation-Interactivity.