Lecture 2CS148/248: Interactive Narrative

UC Santa CruzSchool of Engineeringwww.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps248/Spring2007michaelm@cs.ucsc.edu10 April 2007

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Drama McKee describes the dramatic story, the story

told by Hollywood screenplays and “non-experimental” stageplays Well formed plot arcs (structure) Intensity (nothing extraneous, distilled, boiled down) Mimesis (telling a story by showing)

For many of us, our implicit model of what makes a good story is informed by our experience of cinema

Drama is communicated through action Why might this be a useful model for interactive

narrative?

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Dramatic structure Drama selects key moments from characters’ life stories

The story told vs. life story Distillation of the essence of life

Structure is a selection of events from characters’ life stories strategically composed to express specific emotions and points of view

Story event A story even turns (changes) a story value

Story value Universal binary qualities of human experience Alive/dead, love/hate, freedom/slavery, courage/cowardice,

wisdom/stupidity, …

Conflict Change in the story value is achieved through conflict – values

shouldn’t change through accident or coincidence

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Scenes and beats Scene

A story event that changes at least one value (from negative to positive or vice-versa)

No exposition – information should always be communicated through value change

Test of “sceneness” – could the story event be expressed in a unity of time and space?

Beat – action/reaction pairs that shape the turning of the scene The smallest unit of value change

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Sequences, acts and stories A sequence is a series of scenes (typically 2 to 5) that

culminates with greater impact than any previous scene Each scene turns its own value The sequence turns a greater value that subordinates the others

An act is a series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene causing a major reversal of values, more powerful than any preceeding scene or sequence

The story, in the story climax, brings about absolute and irreversible change The audience can’t imagine any change past this

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The Protagonist The protagonist is the central character, providing a

point of view and motive force for the action The protagonist might be plural (e.g. representing a whole social

class) or multiple (intertwining multiple points of view)

The protagonist must be willful – no passive protagonists Has a conscious, and potentially an unconscious object of desire

The protagonist must have the capacities to pursue the object of desire and must have at least a chance Without the possibility of achievement the audience looses

interest

The protagonist has the will and capacity to pursue the object of desire to the limit

The story will build to a final action beyond which the audience can not imagine another

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Empathy and identification The audience must be able to empathize

with the protagonist This is not the same as sympathy – doesn’t mean

you like the character

In Aristotelian drama, empathy results in identification – the audience experiences what the protagonist experiences

The drama takes the audience on an emotional journey through the values explored by the story

The audience then experiences catharsis (a purgation of the emotions)

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Conflict The will of the protagonist must be resisted

The protagonist takes the minimal, reasonable action to achieve her goal, but provokes antagonism

This is different from real life – most of the time our actions don’t provoke antagonism (though we may encounter resistance)

Inner conflicts Mind, body, emotions

Personal conflicts Family, lovers, friends

Extra-personal conflicts Social institutions, individuals in society (social roles),

physical environment

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The gap Conflict happens where the subjective and objective

realms touch The protagonist has an expectation of the results of her

action, but the provoked conflict violates expectations

The first action of the protagonist results in this gap – the second action now involves risk (there’s something to lose)

As actions result in gaps, the ante must be upped, with the “minimal and reasonable action” becoming bigger and more being put at risk

The character’s desire must be strong enough to take us to the end of the story (maximum risk, irrevocable change)

To create emotional truth for your character, you must write from the inside out, asking yourself “if I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?”

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Poor man’s semiotics Semiology is concerned with the phenomenon of

meaning: how it is that something (e.g. a mark on a page, an article of clothing, a dish in a meal), can have meaning for somebody

A sign is the fundamental unit of meaning and consists of two parts: the signifier and the signified

The signifier is the uninterpreted object or sensory impression that, by convention, means something

The signified is the meaning, which is always a mental representation In written language, “cat” is a signifier, and the mental

image those marks bring to mind the signified In the language of highway codes, the color red is a

signifier, and the mental image of stopping a vehicle the signified

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The sign

signified

“cat”signifier

Plane of Expression

Plane of Content

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Syntagm and paradigm Signs can be combined into complex configurations

call syntagms Linguistic signs can be combined into sentences and

paragraphs Cinematic signs can be combined into scenes

A paradigm defines a potential structure of associative fields – each field defines signs that can play the same role within a syntagm Example: The Food System

Syntagms are specific meals The paradigm groups foodstuffs into entrees, deserts, salads,

etc.

A sign system defines the legal syntagms that can be constructed – includes the paradigm

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Connotation Connotation occurs when one semiotic system

becomes the expression plane of another

Proud, self-reliant

signified

“cat” signifier

signifier signified

Plane of Denotation

Plane of Connotation

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Meta-language Meta-language occurs when one semiotic system

becomes the content plane of another

signified

“cat” signifier

signifier signified

Object language

Meta-language

“sign for cat”

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Poor man’s narratology Narratology – a structuralist analysis of narrative

Enabling move: separating the “objective” story from the presented story

Story/fabula – The objective sequence of events that constitutes the story

Discourse/sjuzhet – The presentation of the story (always involves manipulation)

Diegesis – The story world, the time-space continuum of the story (the story is a sequences of events in the diegetic world)

Narration – the mechanics by which the discourse is produced from the story (e.g. third vs. first person etc.)

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The narrative situation

1 2 3 4 5

Diegetic universe

Story

1 5 3 2 4prolepsis (flash-forward)

analepsis (flash-back)

DiscourseFocalization

Interpretation

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Narrative, Media, Modes In order to be able to talk about interactive narrative, one

must be able to talk about narrative in different media (since various forms of interactive narrative will constitute new media)

Classical narratology tends towards privileging specific media Radical media relativism argues that signifier can’t be separated

from signified – therefore there’s no way to talk about “narrative” in the abstract

Other theorists have so generalized the notion of narrative, that it ceases to form a coherent category Narratives of identity Grand narratives of history Cultural narrative

Ryan’s goal in this chapter is to define a notion of narrative powerful enough to define a coherent category, but general enough to be medium independent

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Narrative dimensions Consider “narrativeness” a scalar value (more or less

narrative) rather than a boolean value (is or is not a narrative) Do this by defining 8 narrative dimensions – if a specific media

instance strongly has all these properties, then it has very high narrativeness (a “classical” story)

Subsets of the dimensions can be considered for specific purposes

Spatial Dimension Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated

existents

Temporal Dimension The world must be situated in time and undergo significant

transformations The transformations must be caused by non-habitual physical

events

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Narrative dimensions (continued) Mental Dimension

Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world

Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents, motivated by identifiable goals and plans

Formal and Pragmatic Dimensions The sequence must form a unified causal chain

and lead to closure The occurrence of at least some of these events

must be asserted as fact in the story world The story must communicate something

meaningful to the recipient

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The cognitive skills of narrative interpretation Understanding a narrative involves the exercise of

multiple cognitive skills Focusing thought on specific objects cut out from the

flux of perception Inferring causal relationships between states and events Situating events in time Reconstructing content of other people’s minds based

on their behavior

But the exercise of these cognitive skills alone does not make something a narrative – only when all of these skills come together to construct a stable mentall image do we have narrative

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Narrative modes In order to develop a media-free narratology, we

need to understand the various mechanisms by which narrative scripts can be evoked A narrative script is the mental image of the narrative The standard way of evoking narrative scripts is for

someone to tell someone else that something happened (narrating a story)

A narrative mode is a distinct way to bring to mind the cognitive construct that defines narrativity

Ryan defines a number of dimensions that characterize different narrative modes These dimensions are not completely independent

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Narrative modes (continued) External/Internal

In external mode, narratives are encoded in material signs Internal mode does not involve textualization

Fictional/Nonfictional Whether the narrative involves this world or a possible world

Representational/Simulative Representational mode encodes a fixed sequence (isolates a

fixed possibility) Simulative mode is productive of multiple possibilities

Diegetic/mimetic In diegetic mode, the narrative is communicated through

telling In mimetic mode, the narrative is communicated through

showing

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Narrative modes (continued) Autotelic/Utilitarian

In autotelic mode, a story is told for its own sake In utilitarian mode, a story is subordinated to another goal

Autonomous/Illustrative In autonomous mode, the story is new to the receiver In illustrative mode, the story retells and completes a story,

depending on the receiver’s previous knowledge

Scripted/Emergent In scripted mode, story and discourse are fixed In emergent mode, discourse and some aspects of story are

created live

Receptive/Participatory In receptive mode, the recipient plays no role in discourse or story In participatory mode (subcategory of emergent), the active

participation of the recipient actualizes and completes the story on the level of discourse and/or story

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Narrative modes (continued) Determinate/indeterminate

In determinate mode, the text specifies enough points along the story arc to form a definite script

In indeterminate mode, only a few points are given – the recipient fills in the rest

Retrospective/simultaneous/prospective The recounting of past, current, or future events

Literal/metaphorical In literal mode, the narrative satisfies most or all of the 8

definitional dimensions In metaphorical mode, there are violations of a number

of the dimensions The goal of this distinction is to recognize the expanded

notions of the term “narrative” without sacrificing the precision of the core construct

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What are media? Two contrasting views: the pipe vs. language

The pipe view enables transmedial analysis but ignores the affordances of different media

E.g. TV – a transmissive medium, but has its own affordances The language view admits the affordances of different media, but

risks radical media relativism

The language notion of media is primary – there’s nothing to transmit through a pipe unless it has first been encoded in language

There may be no pure pipes – things that look like pipes mall all have language-like affordances

Since the language view is primary, Ryan wants to find a middle ground that recognizes the material support of semiotic languages, will avoiding both the media relativist and pipe views

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Three ways to analyze media Media as semiotic phenomena – broad categories of

sign systems Language Images Music

Media as technologies Allows us to drill in on specific material supports – fractures

broad categories of sign systems into specific subtypes E.g. Ong’s analysis of the shift from oral culture, to writing,

to printing

Media as cultural practice (communities of practice) Lack a distinct semiotic and technological identity (e.g.

newspapers vs. books) Evolution of media forms depends on cultural pressures

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Narrative differences across media Narrative differences across media play out in three

different narrative domains Semantics (plot or story) Syntax (discourse) Pragmatics (uses of narrative)

Plot or story Film prefers dramatic narratives structured by Aristotelian arc –

TV prefers episodic narratives with multiple plot lines – computer games prefer quest narratives with a single plot line divided into multiple autonomous episodes

Discourse Comics represent time via space usng distinct frames, film

presents a continuously moving image with edits

Uses of narrative Blogging (posting of private diaries), tabletop RPGs (group

improvisational stories)

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Genre vs. medium A medium is defined by a semiotic language and a

technological support that provide specific expressive affordances

A genre is a set of explicit rules for using a medium in a specific way

The distinction can be fuzzy A medium is defined by cultural forces, but so is a genre (genre

can reside in communities of practice) Different media employ different semiotic languages, but genre

conventions can be understood as semiotic sub-languages

Examples The print novel is a medium – horror stories and detective

stories are genres Film is a medium – the light romantic comedy and the road

movie are genres