One point sounds familiar: how the creaters of games, the designers, are creators not of stories, but of narrative potential. I know I worded this argument years ago, but was that in one of the many sessions of discussion - argument - supervision with Espen, or did it actually make its way into the thesis? It does not really matter now, all it does is create a flashback to the past: the point when I tried to understand the mass of material I had gathered, and then position it.
A central idea of the presentation which I am delighted to see is how Eladhari underlines the creative process of playing: how a virtual world depends on the activities of the participants in order to unfold into many-faceted narrative environments in the same way as reality holds an endless amount of stories.
Most of all this session underlines my own creeping sensation of ageing: not only are the lights less bright, the print smaller and the stairs steeper than 10 years ago - I also no longer know what I read and wrote where or when. Disgusting feeling... but also reassuring. I have been able to let go of more than I thought.
[The updates here will be selfcentered - as my mind insists on tracking down where, when, what did I write about this. First link back into my own mind: narrative environment - a thought after typing out an interview with a player.
Yes, I do write about narrative environment in my thesis (large pdf), but the concept comes there from Janet Murray:
When the things we do bring tangible results, we experience the second characteristic delight of electronic environments - the sense of agency. Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices. We expect to feel agency on the computer when we double-click on a file and see it open before us or when we enter numbers in a spreadsheet and see the totals readjust. However, we do not usually expect to experience agency within a narrative environment. (Murray 1997:126)
I do however expand on it and discuss the difference between narrative environments and stories on page 20 and out from there. OK, that felt good. I did write about it, and my brain is not as petrified as I feared.]
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1 comment:
Brian, that is my experience as well. Which is why I like the distinction between a narrative and an environment with the potential for creating narratives. The way I see it role-players prefer to tell the stories afterwards, not to enact them or even re-enact them. Frequently re-enactment is understood not as recreating an event, but as doing it over again the way it could have happened if...
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