[Panel] Conversations with Games: Emergent Narratives and Gameplay Experience

Emergent Narratives (ENs) provide a rich tool for uncovering untold tales when we play video games. They are stories that are not embedded by the game’s author, instead arising from the game’s mechanics (Adams, 2013). This enables the game to create new events for the player to experience, generated from the player’s choices (Louchart et al 2008). ENs, therefore, are generally understood as a co-creation of the player making choices and the game’s author, who designed those choices. However, games themselves—independent of their authors—are important participants in creating narratives, as their involvement in gameplay creates meaningful experiences for players by drawing boundaries around the type and scope of those stories. And so, rather than seeing narratives as a series of events, we can look at them as a series of conversations between the player and game.

Conversational narratives are told by multiple story tellers through their interactions and negotiation (Norrick 2007). When conversing with others, we talk to make a point, to catch up, or to entertain one another. In these conversations, we leave room for other people to participate by responding to our prompts and vice versa (Norrick 2007). It is no different with games, conversing with them via the language of player actions—in-game events directly caused by the player’s input—and game challenges—a task set out by the game for the player to overcome (Adams 2013; pg 276 & 10). The player develops an understanding of the game challenges and replies back with their actions to satisfy the goal. The game answers back to the player with new challenges, often guiding the player through the game world or the goals of the game. The complexity of modern video games leaves room for the game to respond with an unintended interaction of its mechanics, which creates options for players to choose that the author did not intend. Removing the game’s author opens a conversational interactive moment between the game and the player alone (Giddings 2009, Brett 2021).

What might emerge from these conversations with games? In this panel, we study the snippets that emerge from the conversations between game and player at the moment of gameplay—the stories we tell with games. We believe that by looking at these conversational narratives that emerge from our interactions with games we can uncover different stories created during gameplay. We illustrate the strengths of using this mode of analysis by analysing stories at various levels: How game design might bias the game to speak in a way which privileges certain types of players through their cognitive and motor abilities, how designing believable non-player characters moves us to experience emotionally-driven conversations, and how the game or ourselves can bring in political elements to the conversations we have with games.

References

Adams, E. (2013). Fundamentals of Game Design. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

Brett, N. (2021). Moments of Political Gameplay: Game Design as a Mobilization Tool for Far-Right Action. In M. Devries, J. Bessant, & R. Watts. (Eds.) Rise of the Far Right: Technologies of Recruitment and Mobilization, (pp. 215-236). London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Giddings, S. (2009). Events and collusions: A glossary for the microethnography of video game play. Games and Culture, 4 (2), 144-157.

Louchart, S., Kriegel, M., Figueiredo, R., & Paiva, A. (2008). Authoring Emergent Narrative-based Games. J. Game Dev., 3 (1), 19-37.

Norrick, N. (2007). Conversational Storytelling. In D. Herman (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 127-141). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.