Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [45]
The use of the concepts of story and discourse, and the positioning of the concepts as separate, is another way that ludologists have used narrative theory in order to argue against a narratological approach to games. Espen Aarseth (1997) makes this distinction when he talks about fiction versus narrative. For him, fiction pertains to content while narrative pertains to form. The form of a narrative must be linear. Thus, he insists that a game or a hypertext can be a fiction without being a narrative (Aarseth, 1997, p. 85). For these particular ludologists, a story (or at least a storyworld) can exist without an actual narrative. Narrative is seen as the particular way that discourse unfolds, and it is seen as separate from the plot of a story. However, as I have shown in the previous chapter, story is not as separable from discourse as one might imagine. To “separate” a story from the medium is to change the story.
The strongest point from the ludology camp is that games represent something new, something that cannot be explained simply with our old methods for studying narratives. Aarseth (1997) articulates this point clearly saying that “to claim there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories” (p. 5). He criticizes scholars for ascribing to the “spatiodynamic fallacy where the narrative is not perceived as a presentation of the world but rather as the world itself” (Aarseth, 1997, p. 3). It is easy to see where such criticism comes from when we look at scholars at the other end of the spectrum. The enthusiasm of Janet Murray (1998) for games as narratives extends to games such as Monopoly, which she regards as “an interpretation of capitalism, an enactment of the allures and disappointments of a zero-sum economy in which one gets rich by impoverishing one’s neighbors” (p. 143). Even Tetris, she says, has a “clearly dramatic content” (p. 144). While she may have a point that Monopoly or Tetris can be constructed into a story by the gamer or may tap into cultural metanarratives, there is no obvious narration within these games. Murray clearly takes things too far and, in light of this, one can see where the instinct to find a new perspective on games emerges. Not only does she blanketly apply the idea of narrative to games, she does very little to separate different types of games from one another.
Unfortunately, in trying to find a unique lens through which to study games, some scholars have ignored the important role that narrative plays in many games altogether. Along with Aarseth (1997), Jesper Juul (2001) and Bernadette Flynn (2004) reject the “spatiodynamic fallacy” and argue that games often involve an exploration of a world without involving a narrative structure. Flynn’s (2004) article on “Games as Inhabited Spaces” suggests that games should be seen through an aesthetics of space, which she states is “grounded in immersive aesthetics, maps, tours, modes of navigation and geometric landscapes,” rather than in narrative aesthetics (p. 54). However, in Flynn’s attempt to avoid conflating game and narrative, she makes her own reductive moves. Her argument avoids placing games into the narrative pigeonhole only by “shoehorning” them into a new slot—one of spatial exploration. To consider every aspect of the game as narrative, is indeed to try to fit something expansive in a restrictive and inappropriate structure. Yet, the same holds true for reducing them only to an aesthetic of space. To recognize that games can fit in both a narrative and a spatial aesthetic is to acknowledge their diverse and complicated nature.