Stories for Eyes, Ears, and Muscles

Abstract

The chapter discusses how storytelling represents an innate mental capacity to synthesize an agency’s perceptual input, its emotions, and its output in terms of action. Insight into the architecture of the embodied brain and the PECMA flow clarifies how to understand the psychological function of stories and storytelling. The chapter further describes the way that different media—language and oral storytelling, drama, written stories, film, and video games—use different aspects of the mental “storytelling” that characterizes our ordinary experience of daily life and its actions, and it describes the historical development in narrative techniques of representation in different media. It uses this narrative theory to redefine the story-discourse dichotomy, and to argue that film narratives are typically experienced as taking place in a kind of presence, and also discusses the relation between narratives and playing games vital for interactive media. Finally, it discusses the relationship between storytelling interactivity and linearity and shows that there are a number of psychological and motivational reasons that nonlinear storytelling is difficult, and that many so-called nonlinear formats consist in fact of sets of linear stories.</ABS>

Video Games as Objects and Vehicles of Nostalgia

“…They are real and true, "for a given value of true," as Terry Pratchett would say (Terry 1999, p. 12). They also engender real nostalgia: walking up to an old Mortal Kombat machine, even after a decade of not playing the game, upon touching the controls, gamers instinctively remember deadly combos as muscle memory kicks in, giving them a jolt of pleasurable expertise rooted in the past (Grodal 2013;Gundersen et al 2018;Wymbs and Grafton 2014). Generations of gamers share personal stories of their favourite childhood games and how to reanimate them on newer platforms through forums and social media, bringing people together by virtue of their common gaming histories.…”

Architectures of deviation: exploring the spatial protocols of contemporary videogames

“…Playing a game is to repeatedly test ourselves against a consistent logic, and so the portrayed world needs to reinforce certain spatial consistencies even if we fly from location to location. Torben Grodal calls this condition the 'aesthetics of repetition', 20 and for a videogame space to be playable under these terms, it must continually and In the past, an idealised frame rate of 30 frames per second (fps) was considered, to (nearly) mirror the cinematic speed of experience. With advances in technology, developers have sought to push the industry-standard to 60fps.…”

“…territories as one contiguous space, where changes in scale and context are equalised by the aesthetic condition of the player 'drawing form out through their hands'. 53 In effect then, these become architectural crystallisations of the virtual city as experienced by the player through this long-zoom strategy [20,21].…”

Experiencing, Experimenting with, and Performing Visual Narratives

“…Nevertheless, as Grodal underlines, digital games based on action and performance cannot possibly achieve nonlinearity, since "[a]n experiential flow is-unless totally unfocused-a linear process in time," always governed by patterns of cause and effect. 41 The completion of a gameplay task, even if it results in a highly personalised narrative experience, must always unfold linearly, as do the stories told in literary serials and shown in cinematic blockbusters. In addition, the gaze of the gamer is always teleological, as it necessarily focuses on a goal which must be achieved through a series of steps.…”

“…As Grodal puts it, with action videogames, "not only are we able to see and feel, we are even able to ACT upon what we see in light of our concerns, our (inter)active motor capabilities allow us to shoot at what frightens us or approach what activates our curiosity." 45 Despite the presence of cutscenes, which temporarily turn the user into a viewer, the play experience remains one of bodily engagement and participation: during gameplay sequences, the player must react to visual and oral stimuli, and she does so through kinaesthetic implication. The player's linear progression thus takes the shape of an active performance, as she presses buttons on her keyboard or controller with necessary eye-hand coordination in order to cause effects that will help her towards a goal.…”