For
this assignment we were tasked with exploring Zelda a Link to the Past
and then discuss and reflect on what is meaningful and what type of
experience this type of game offers its players. I knew from playing
Zelda games previously that I wanted to focus on the narrative that this
type of experience offers. Below is a journey into my thoughts through
this experience. The game link is below:
nar·ra·tive
noun \ˈner-ə-tiv, ˈna-rə-\
: a story that is told or written
To me the best explanation of why Zelda in my mind brought narrative to
the hearts of video game players is below:
Story
A Link to the Past is a prequel to the original The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.[11][12][13] At the beginning of the game, a young boy named Link is awakened by a telepathic message from Princess Zelda,
who says that she is locked in the dungeon of nearby Hyrule Castle. As
the message closes, Link finds his uncle ready for battle, telling Link
to remain in bed. After his uncle leaves, however, Link ignores his
uncle's command and follows him to the dungeons under Hyrule Castle.
When he arrives, he finds his uncle mortally wounded. Link's uncle tells
Link to rescue Princess Zelda from her prison, giving him his sword and
shield. Link navigates the castle and rescues Zelda from her cell, and
the two escape into a secret passage through the sewers that leads to a
sanctuary.[14]
Link
is told by a man in the sanctuary that Agahnim, a wizard who has
usurped the throne, is planning to break a seal made hundreds of years
ago by the Seven Sages. The seal was placed to imprison a dark wizard
named Ganon
in the Dark World, a near-mirror of Hyrule which was once known as the
Sacred Realm before Ganon invaded it, obtained the legendary Triforce
held there, and used its power to turn the realm into a land of
darkness. Agahnim intends to break the seal by sending the descendants
of the Seven Sages who made the seal into the Dark World. The only thing
that can defeat Agahnim is the Master Sword,
a sword forged to combat evil. To prove that he is worthy to wield it,
Link needs three magic pendants, hidden in dungeons guarded by mythical
defenders. On his way to retrieve the first, he meets an elder,
Sahasrahla, who becomes Link's mentor offering hints and advice at key
stages of the journey. After retrieving the pendants, Link takes them to
the resting place of the Master Sword. As Link draws the sword from its
pedestal, Zelda telepathically calls him to the Sanctuary, informing
him that soldiers of Hyrule Castle have arrived. Link arrives at the
Sanctuary moments after the soldiers have vacated, where he learns from
the dying Sanctuary keeper that Zelda has been taken to Hyrule Castle.
Link goes to rescue her but arrives too late; Agahnim sends Zelda to the
Dark World. Link then faces Agahnim in battle and defeats him, but
Agahnim's last act is to send Link to the Dark World as well.[14]
To save Hyrule,
Link is required to rescue the seven descendants of the Seven Sages
from dungeons scattered across the Dark World. Once the seven maidens
are freed, they use their power to break the barrier around Ganon's
Tower, where Link faces Agahnim, who creates two ghostly specters each
as powerful as he is. After Link defeats Agahnim for a second time,
Ganon rises up from Agahnim's body, turns into a bat, and flies away.
Link chases him, finally confronting him inside the Pyramid of Power at
the center of the Dark World. After a battle resulting in Ganon's
demise, Link touches the Triforce and restores both the Dark World and
Hyrule to their state before Ganon intervened.[14]
It
would be hard to argue the power of storytelling is not on full
display in Zelda games. It would be equally hard to argue the story of Link and Zelda
is one of the most adoring features Zelda games have produced over the many
years. In the honor of full disclosure you should know I am partial to
Zelda. It was the first game I ever completed and felt a sense of
accomplishment and emotion over. The story had me. It had me from the
beginning to the end. You see, I was Link.. That’s right, I Jason
Marconi, played Zelda and became Link. I would play during my fathers
allotted times for game play (snow storms, rainy days, or a few select
lucky moments as me and my sister saw it). When I was not allowed to
play, I was adventuring up and down the creek across from our house and
under the bridge that allowed me to cross spruce lane undetected. From
there I entered the Lost Woods (recurring area in Zelda games) and into
the vast forest between the road I grew up on and state route 309. I
look at that forest now and it seems so small, but I can remember taking
my red “rambo” bow and arrow and
traveling through those woods for hours, as Link in search for
adventure. That is how much the narrative of Zelda meant to me, it was
my childhood for a while. Where I grew up we had a small neighborhood, and the
majority of children in the neighborhood where at different ages.
Pretending to be Link saving Princess Zelda was my play. It was my
greatest adventure, I saved orange salamanders, hid from futuristic cars
passing on the road, threw rocks at snakes that stood between me and
Princess Zelda, and ruined A LOT of clothes. My real life imagination
took me somewhere the narrative and gameplay of Zelda created.
I have recently taken too reading as much as I can about the power of narrative in games. I stumbled upon an on-going academic debate that seems to be as endless as the chicken or egg debate. I enjoy both sides of the argument (Ludologists versus Narratologists) and try to draw connections to where I should fall on this debate by referencing such experiences from my past, as well as the limited readings I’ve done thus far. What I shared with you above is an incredibly personal look into some of the best memories I have. The story I shared is the narrative to early chapters in my life. In Gonzalo Frasca’s Ludologists love stories, too: Notes from a debate that never took place he quotes Rune Klevjer who in return quotes Markku Eskelinen:
“ The Gaming Situation, Markku Eskelinen rightly points out, drawing on Espen Aarseth’s well-known typology of cybertext, that playing a game is predominantly a configurative practice, not an interpretative one like film or literature. However, the deeply problematic claim following from this is that stories “are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrapping to games” (Frasca, 2003)
I
could be reading into that statement and claim in an unintended way,
but the message is up to the receiver to interpret, and how I interpret
that is, games and narratives are not considered in the same realm due
to interpretive nature that games do not offer(whether through
development or gameplay), or so claims this particular statement. The
text claims that games are a configurative practice not an interpretive
one. I am going to share some thoughts below on my interpretation of
Zelda, but Rune Klevjer could have been discussing how games are
configurative to create and not Interpretive. This may have been true
ten years ago, but when the production into games such as Bioshock, Gone
Home, Journey, Limbo, The Stanley Parable and other artistic games were
being created we can play and see the journey of the game designers
interpretation of life, love, loss and psychology. Much like an author. A
great example of game designer interpretation being put into an action
adventure game is 2K’s Bioschock.. In an interview with popular video
game review and news website Gamespot, Creative Director of the game Ken
Levine explained his interpretations of the story through the gameplay
he was trying to tell. The full interview which I suggest reading
through if you're interested is here:
Here is an excerpt that helps follow my thoughts:
GS:
For a utopia free from religion, there are a lot of Christian religious
overtones to the game (Adam, Eve, Rapture, smuggled crucifixes and
bibles), but only one non-Christian thing I spotted: the Epstein the
Swami machines. Were you intending to make any commentary specific to
Christianity, or was that just what you thought would be most
recognizable to your audience?
KL:
The game is full of examples of people who have strong ideologies,
whether it's Ryan or Cohen or Steinman. They all have their own
religions in a way, right? Steinman's got his church of the beautiful
and he said he talks to a goddess. Cohen's got his church of the
aesthetic. And Ryan's got his own set of precepts that are pretty
unyielding. I think that the first thing any strong ideology does, by
necessity, is to crush all other ideologies and remove them because they
tend to be incompatible. That is one of the reasons that religion was
pushed out of Rapture.
But
I think conversely, if you look at the history of a lot of religion,
you see a similar approach taken there. One religion tends to take hold
in a nonpluralistic society. They tend to try to push out other
religions. You see that the different belief systems having
incompatibilities, and if you really adhere 100 percent to any belief
system without question, it's very difficult for you to accept
incompatibilities of that belief system.
The
gameplay and narrative of Bioshock is enjoyable, but ultimately came
from a collection of interpretations. That is, in my opinion at least. I
am at a disadvantage to discuss this more in depth due to natural time
constraints in the ability to research this further and develop my own
research backed theory. So as much as I hate to admit it, I can only
offer my opinion at this point. Let us get back to Zelda and narrative
below.
I took the story of Zelda and Link at a young age and turned into my
own adventure. I feel that is the goal of every great story or folktale.
To take the audience and transport them into the story. Zelda was that
transportation for me. What is more powerful to me as I look back on
this part of my life is nothing else really struck me to act out in the
fantasy of a universe the way Zelda did. Not only was I interpreting the
world that surrounded Zelda, but I was engaging in that world through
my own imagination outside of playing the game. This active engagement
is something many researchers have found to be critical in childhood
development. I’ve come to appreciate that freedom I had as a child to
create these universes, maybe that is why I feel the box can still be a
spaceship, even at thirty years old. I have to disagree with Eskelinen,
that playing a game is a predominantly a configurative experience.
(readers
note: After boldly stating I was going to disagree with Eskelinen, I
decided to read as much of his material as I could, by the end it
wasn't as easy as disagreeing and feeling right, I could no longer
produce the “why” I felt he was wrong other than grasping at some
instances of modern games, I’ll explain below)
When
I decided to disagree with Eskelinen, I decided to read more into where
he was deriving his opinion. It turns out, the space between
configurative and interpretive is a little more murky than how I was
interpreting his writing.
Another quick look at Espen Aarseth's typology of cybertexts (Aarseth 1997, 62-65) should make us see that the dominant user function in literature, theatre and film is interpretative, but in games it is the configurative one. To generalize: in art we might have to configure in order to be able to interpret whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure, and proceed from the beginning to the winning or some other situation (3).In literature, theatre and film everything matters or is conventionally supposed to matter equally - if you've seen 90% of the presentation that's not enough, you have to see or read it all (or everything you can). This is characteristic of dominantly interpretative practices in general. In contrast, in computer games you either can't or don't have to encounter every possible combinatory event and existent the game contains, as these differ in their ergodic importance. Some actions and reactions in relation to certain events will bring the player quicker to a solution or help her reach the winning situation sooner or more effectively than others. There are events and existents the player has to manipulate or configure in order to progress in the game or just to be able to continue it. Events, existents and the relations between them can be described at least in spatial, temporal, causal and functional terms. It's equally self-evident that the importance of these dimensions varies from game to game and sometimes also within the phases and levels of an individual game. (Eskelinen, 2001)
What
I take from this is looking at games as manipulations of players on the
screen and not taking into account the player engagement to the story. I
can beat a game and not take anything from the story. I can read a book
and not take anything from the story. For a moment maybe we should
forget about those types of books and games. Ultimately the player or
reader will be the ones configuring or interpreting, so should it be on
them to decide?
I
want to look more at the way Zelda for this assignment took narrative
and attached it to action and adventure gameplay. Many narrative in the
past follow a similar set of events similar to folk tales. Zelda
follows this and forms a moving story that drives the action and
adventure from its core. I use the word core there purposefully, because
I feel the core value of the Zelda games rely on narrative. Jesper
Juul notes this as “a
simple structure with a positive state broken by an external evil
force. It is the role of the player to recreate this original positive
state. This is, of course, a sequence often found in folk tales: An
initial state, an overturning of this state, and a restoration of the
state” (Juul, 2001). The
sequence for the narrative is set out, Link our hero, Princess Zelda or
victim, the evil forces, and the player sets out to correct the
overturned state. What is in the middle of this arch? You are, the
player. The action and adventure drive the arch, without it for this
particular game we would never fully realise the overturned state or the
correction to restoration. My question then is, if the player never
beats the game, and fully completes the arch, is it then considered an
incomplete narrative, or is it something different?
Where
I found that I was arguing with myself was over distinction. I sat back
and decided to think more about the educational side of games. The
components that work but more specifically whether games by
themselves(action adventure in this case) are appropriate for
educational purposes. After all, the class I am taking deals with
gamification in education. I found one train of thought in Game Design
as Narrative Architecture by Henry Jenkins, he says “ If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories”.(Jenkins, 2004) Viola!
That is the point right? If Zelda tells a story through action and
adventure at my command and control it is never going to recreate that
exact experience for me in a movie, or book. Stay with me here,
If I learn how to solve E=mc2 through literature that is one
experience. Perhaps, I even learn best through that experience. If as a
student I learn E=mc2 through a movie, is that not another medium in
which I have learned the concept? Again, perhaps that movie and watching
it was the best way for me to learn. If I then solve E=mc2 through
various practices and scenarios, I have again learned the concept in a
different medium, and like the previous mediums perhaps the hands on
practice of the concept was the best way for me to learn. Finally, If I
learn E=mc2 by playing a game of the concept (imagine any game that
could teach it, simulation, action adventure, etc.) that is yet another
medium in which I learned E=mc2. Lets manipulate the quote from Jenkins
to be a Jason Marconi half original. If some games teach concepts, they
are unlikely to teach them in the same way other media does. Is this an
accurate statement? The actual game play itself may teach the player in
a different manner, but a game that includes narrative, video, and
hands on via gameplay or mini games can offer a full cross-medium
experience. This has the potential to connect more students of different
learning styles than any ONE medium could.
This
assignment was to revolve around what I took from the action adventure
game Zelda a Link to the past, clearly it turned out to be more.. For me
it truly was a link to the past because I thought of all the times I
had pretending to be Link, and I wanted to know if the power of that
story was prevalent and a need for all games. So like the adult child I
am, my new adventure took me into a new modern day tri-force, ludology,
narrative, and games. If reading this seemed like I was arguing with
myself, that is because I was. I was solving my own problems and
creating my own questions as I wrote line after line, and read more and
more academic writings on the issues. I was being sucked into the
Ocarina of time if you will. (
I’m aware that is 100% geektastic, and I don’t apologize hahah. Monday
through Friday I have to discuss and lecture economic policy, management
and current issues and I seldom get to shed that costume for the
other version of myself haha, so for the twelve weeks of this class i’m
embracing my hidden Sheldon Cooper)
Once
I found myself deep in the rabbit hole of narrative in games, I needed
an end to the circle. Regardless of what narrative does for games, I
want to shine a light on what a good game with narrative and interaction
could do for a student. A student for example, that may not learn a
concept they are struggling over any other way. Even if just one
student, gets that lightbulb moment through game and play, in my opinion
it was/is worth it. Just think, no other medium can represent and
incorporate so many other
mediums the way games can. Maybe that could be their superiority call
to action in classrooms everywhere. A video is just a video, text is
just text, but a game can be all of them and more! I leave with one
last thought on just how similar the story and the game are in their
respective worlds. One final quote I read that struck me:
“Game Designers don’t simply tell stories, they design worlds and sculpt spaces.” (Jenkins, 2004).
Maybe there aptly should be similarities to games, game design, and narratives.
Maybe there aptly should be similarities to games, game design, and narratives.
Here is an excerpt from a book that transported me into an alternate
universe the same way Zelda did, ask yourself, is that not a sculpted
space and designed world unfolding in your imagination..
“
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort
to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of
Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty
dust from entering along with him.
The
hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the
wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the
face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and
ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use
trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at
present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was
part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was
seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine, and had a varicose
ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the
way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the
enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which
are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG
BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside
the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had
something to do with the production of pig iron. The voice came from an
oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the
surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice
sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The
instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed) but there
was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a
smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by
the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was
very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse
soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just
ended.
Outside,
even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the
street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered
everywhere. The black-mustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding
corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG
BROTHER Is WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked
deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at
one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind' alternately covering and
uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter
skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a
blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the
Police Patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not
matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind
Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away
about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three Year Plan. The
telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that
Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up
by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which
the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There
was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged
in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that
they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in
your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from
habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made
was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston
kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he
well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry
of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy
landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste, this was
London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of
the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory
that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this.
Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses,
their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with
cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls
sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust
swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of
rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and
there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken
houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of
his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against
no background and mostly unintelligible.
The
Ministry of Truth-Minitrue, in Newspeak-was startlingly different from
any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of
glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three
hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just
possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the
three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE- FREEDOM IS SLAVERY- IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. (Orwell, 1949)
PART ONE
excerpted from the book
1984
by George Orwell
Harcourt Brace 1949 - Plume printing 1983, paper
References
Eskelinen, M. (n.d.). The Gaming Situation. Game Studies 0101: Eskelinen:. Retrieved March 15,
2014, from http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/
Frasca, G. (2003). Ludologists love stories, too: notes from a debate that never took place.
DIGRA Conf..
GameSpot. (n.d.). GameSpot. Retrieved March 15, 2014, from
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/qanda-diving-deeper-into-bioshocks-story/1100-6179423/
Jenkins, H. (2004). Game design as narrative architecture. Computer, 44, s3.
Juul, J. (2001). Games telling stories. Game studies, 1(1), 45.
Lindley, E. (2005). Story and narrative structures in computer games. Bushoff, Brunhild. ed.
Orwell, G., & Fromm, E. (19611949). 1984: a novel. New York, N.Y.: Signet Classic.
Zimmerman, E. (2004). Narrative, interactivity, play, and games: Four naughty concepts in need
of discipline. First person: New media as story, performance, and game, 154-164.
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