I just don’t think that this is a 100% truthful statement. I *want* it to be… but this idea that all people are creating narratives passively is unfalsifiable. There’s no way to disprove it, because it’s relying on, essentially, a magical view of what’s going on in games – that the players are creating narratives that matter to them and please them, even though they aren’t aware that they’re doing it.

This is a good blog. I think you might want to re-think this evidence and subsequent conclusion. Maybe you’ll come to the same conclusion, I don’t know.

You could PERHAPS, at a stretch, posit that as soon as two players compete in any game they’re creating their own, individual narrative unique to their match, but then you’re starting to sound like Raph Koster :)

It’s like this: I like where your thought is going, but I think we need to inject some segmentation into the argument. Often we try to think of games that are “perfect,” and feel compelled to advocate for one mix of narrative and gameplay–or any other elements–over another. As was alluded to by another comment, the key here may be in contextualizing the value proposition. Maybe somebody likes games with narrative, maybe somebody likes games _for_ the narrative, maybe somebody likes games where you get to hit little kids in the groin with sledgehammers (am I right?).

In any case, it seems to me that video games as a medium/product/phenomenon/whatever are ruthlessly complex in comparison to most other consumer goods or art forms. And by that, I mean the way we experience them is ruthlessly complex. The level of interactivity is incredible, and lends itself to an astronomical number of experiences that a user can receive and help create, so that even two players of an identical game will seldom have an identical experience.

I’m working toward a relevant point here, I promise. What I mean to say is that video games are very difficult to talk about, which makes it difficult to self-identify as a meaningfully specific type of gamer, which makes it difficult to contextualize debates about what kinds of things in which games are really “the best.” I suppose video games aren’t “difficult to talk about” per se, but there certainly isn’t as mature a lexicon for discussing them in meaningful ways as exists in other media. Music has untold genres, and musicians have all manner of words to describe timbre, intonation, style, historical context, etc. when discussing sound. So too for food, painting, dance, and many other art forms, and a large number of these words are propagated thoroughly enough throughout the population to be used in common discourse across many demographic boundaries.

Such is not the case with video games. Despite having some basic genre categories, video games are still largely at the simile stage. We describe them as “like SmashTV, but with influences from Aliens” and hope for the best.

So, like I said, apologies if this is old news–and sorry to spew all over your comments section. Just thought I’d broach the topic of the contextualized value of video games as rooted in the uniquely interactive and emergent nature of experiences in the medium.

Cheers!

Checkers is probably the simplest game I can think of that is relatively narrative free. Sure, it has the “King me” aspect to it, but for the most part it’s a fairly pure game. I guess the nail-jumping game is another ludist’s dream, but to be honest, I find those two games pretty boring.

I would in general agree with this blog post, but I think a lot of people have a vested interest in bringing game design to the forefront right now for several reasons:

A) Narrative has already been critically studied for a good while now – game design hasn’t. This is not to say that studying how narrative elements change inside a game isn’t worthwhile, but even in these cases the ontology is already in place. (And personally, I would argue that ludology needs to catch up with narratology as a critical field before anybody can say anything truly insightful about “ludonarrative”).

B) The old guard of the entertainment industry is moving into the gaming industry on account of the gaming industry outsells them. This old guard understands narrative pretty well but barely even understands that game design exists – enlightening them can spare gamers from horrible games and the industry’s “blue collar” workers from horrible assignments/direction and/or scapegoating.

C) Defending games as an art form is difficult when the people your arguing with only understand narrative and don’t understand ludology. It goes without saying that the mainstream media’s depiction of video gaming hinges almost entirely on narrative content. Ludologists fight to put the OTHER elements of gaming to the forefront because outsiders need to know that its there.

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So, sure, in a perfect world, we’d all stop squabbling – but if Ludologists controlled the conversation for a few years, I don’t think it would be a bad thing either.

Re: Chess example and Jack9′s post -

On one hand, there are a lot of popular board games that have even thinner narratives than chess, so I think the blog’s use of chess as an example is a little dishonest. Tetris, if you want to move into viedo games, has no narrative, is very popular, and contains what I would consider a design that is so excellent and elegant that it must be considered art. And let’s not forget athletics. I think some ludologists might be loathe to admit it, but any honest look at game design needs to include athletic sports under the greater “games” classification. Good game design applies there too.

Again, I agree with the blog post, but I think there are some details it is skimming over and it holds up chess as a straw man example.

On the other, hand, yes, chess might not have survived centuries without its narrative elements. In fact, most games that have been around for centuries have some narrative element to them – so maybe there is something to that. Any sucessful game that lacks narrative might not survive for long stretches of time. And to move back to athletic sports, many people tend to make narrative metaphors when discussing these games – does this really mean narrative is a necessary part of gaming? Maybe, so. Maybe, so. (I’m just throwing ideas around at this point).

As for Jack9′s specific arguments:

Sho-gi is a great game. I’m also pretty sure that it is “only symbols” to you and me because we don’t read Japanese kanji. I’m pretty sure all those pieces are stand in for medeival warriors too, so I call foul on your example. Oh geee, and in which cultures does Sho-gi resonant more? – right, in Japan, where the narrative content is more accessible. If chess were just symbols it would still be a great game, objectively speaking. It also would probably not exist anymore.

Same thing for Korean Resident Evil – sure, you can sitll play it, it’s still a game, but Joe Duder, if given the choice, is going to prefer playing it in English over Korean every time, and there’s a reason for that.

As for gaming manuals providing the “greatest ludologisitc proof” – I also call foul. If anything, the manual just serves to bring unnatural game mechanics out of obscurity. One doesn’t interact with game mechanics by reading about them, they interact with them by playing the game itself.