The edited collection Serialisation in Popular Culture has now been published, including an essay of mine on "The Video Game Fallout 3 as a Serial Fiction." Here is the abstract:

Although computer games and literary narratives use different narrative both media compel players and readers in similar ways through the "sense of an ending," a concept that draws on the work of Frank Kermode. Serial fictions especially must balance between giving readers unexpected twists at the end of each installment, and an ultimate sense of conclusion. Computer games therefore resemble serial fictions because they tease players as they progress through levels (or installments). Games push players down false routes or into unexpected failures in order to make the satisfaction of an ultimate conclusion more pronounced.

Since writing this chapter, based on a conference paper three years ago, I think I've probably become more hardline in relation to the theoretical underpinning for this piece. In particular, I am less inclined than ever to see literary narratives and video game narratives as structurally similar. Indeed, as I point out in the chapter, although video games might seem like serial fictions at a material level, in that they encourage players to download additional content and mods to prolong the story, even this comparison does not really hold, since video games do not require players to pursue these additions, whereas the whole point of serial fiction is that reading the next installment is essential to understanding.

Nevertheless, even if their narrative structures and techniques are different, I am more convinced than ever - based on some of my later research - that from a phenomenological point of view both games and literary texts elicit similar reactions in their 'readers', and seek to produce similar forms of pleasurable engagement. In this case, I draw on Kermode to show how we read and play for the sense of a certain ending that we are denied in our everyday existence.

My thanks to the editors, Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg, for producing a really diverse collection, which rightly examines the ongoing influence of serialisation beyond its alleged Victorian heyday and into the twenty-first century. (Incidentally, for those readers who are especially interested in video games, the latter has written one of the best essay you're ever likely to read on how video games (such as Bioshock) encode capitalist ideology.)

Labels: Fallout 3, publications, serial fiction, serialisation, video games

I have spent much of this summer trying to hammer out a journal article on how different communication technologies – from letters to instant messaging to mobile phones – influence the way in which literary fiction is plotted, since more powerful communications can transcend time and space, and thus change the tempo with which events and interpersonal relationships are conducted.

With this in mind, I was interested to catch an episode of the Secret Life of Students, in which mobile phones and social media play a prominent role in representing the characters’ social interactions, personal feelings, and work-life crises. The representation of text messages, Facebook posts and the like in bubbles above a character’s head is not new. Hollyoaks and the BBC Sherlock are just two examples where this feature is used prominently. However, it is perhaps more unusual to find this in a documentary.



In narrative terms, the function of these devices is similar to that I’ve examined in my paper. Increasingly sophisticated mobile communications serve to dissolve space, so that characters who are physically separate can nevertheless interact with each other in an intimate way, as if in the same room at the same time. Secret Life makes extensive use of jump cuts, so that we see one character with the text message they have written, and then switch to another character sending a response to that message. The constraint that the characters were physically apart, and indeed that the reply may not have been instantaneous, is dissolved. Indeed, one of the programme’s stated aims is to examine how students cope with the separation from friends and family, a separation that is perhaps paradoxically more acute when every message sent from afar reminds them of it. The implicit counterpoint to this is the intimate pressure cooker of the student hall in which personal space and distance are hard to find; as if to stress this, many of the characters still converse with each other via texts and chat boxes even though they are next door, so that privacy is not an option when electronic media can penetrate the walls.

Social media thus serves as a kind of accelerator, giving a sense of events playing out rapidly, in real-time, without the mediation of geography. The students are never alone, but are networked citizens, and the ‘plot’ of the documentary is essentially constructed around how these interactions with others serve to change the students’ behaviours and view of themselves. (On this note, it is interesting that the blurb for Secret Life of Students suggests that it seeks to examine “how social media correlates with their real life experiences” – a problematic question, which falsely implies that somehow social media experiences are not part of real life, when in fact as the programme so readily shows they are woven into the fabric of our networked daily existence.)

Beyond the effect of compressing the distance between the characters, the second feature of social media is that it lends a sense of authenticity to the picture we get of the students. They do not always directly tell us how they are feeling in the traditional piece to camera, but rather tell their friends about how they are feeling via social media, which we can then eavesdrop upon; conversely, the external narrator or voiceover does not have to guide our empathy for the characters, as instead the variously sympathetic, condemnatory, motivational messages that are sent by their friends puts us in a position whereby we are encouraged to feel for them as their friends do. Following the mantra of creative writing tutors, the media stream shows us the characters, rather than telling us about them.

In playing this role, social media is in some senses not entirely new. A rapid-fire conversation via text messages can be seen as the equivalent to an in-person dialogue, the implications of which we have to work out for ourselves. However, whilst performing a similar function of ‘showing’, social media are different from dialogue in that they are passed off as an archival record. Presented on screen, in a form that resembles the look of the original medium, they seem to be authentic. Whereas we know a face-to-face conversation will have been edited – or indeed set up by the producers specifically to expose each characters’ mutual feelings – the representation of popup texts and posts appears (and I stress appears)to be unedited. Because of how often they populate the screen (something not, I think, achievable with earlier communicative media such as letters), and because such messages are usually short and thus not necessarily cut as a conversation must be, they seem like an unmediated testimony about the self.

This impression is, of course, deceptive. Although individual messages might be presented whole, social media works not by self-contained statements but as an ongoing stream of data. The volume of messages shown on screen is probably just a tiny proportion of the posts and commentary with which digital communication showers them on a daily basis, but has been selected to be most revealing. In this way, the programme’s representation of social media ironically replicates the way in which we use social media in our own lives. On social media we craft a persona for ourselves as we would like to be seen by others, not as we actually are; as many have pointed out, we pitch ourselves in violent extremes of happiness or seeking sympathy. So too in the programme what we are actually seeing is not a complete electronic archive of the self on which we can make our own judgement, but a persona crafted as the programme makers want us to see it. Thus the editorial manipulations are concealed behind the presumption that the social media is a true report, just as when we use social media ourselves we assume that it represents our feelings or those of others in an authentic way.

Through the process of editing, the characters duly fall into neat archetypes: the studious and thus slightly alienated aspiring doctor; the young mum studying to achieve a better future for her family; the woman who seems to be a party animal, but whose sociability is actually a symptom of an underlying lack of intellectual self-confidence. That the participants in the documentary have no control over the way their lives are fashioned into these neat narrative categories is not a new problem. However, there is a new ethical question that arises from the way this narrative is fashioned out of their digital detritus. Who owns the messages that we are presented with? Clearly the participants in the programme have permitted the programme makers to comb their mobiles and social media feeds and to propagate them on screen. Yet what about those anonymised ‘friends’ whose messages to the characters we also see? Did everyone who sent them a text message or tweet also sign a disclaimer allowing their correspondence to be used on TV? Even if they did, the scattering of social media throughout the programme serves to indicate problematic, unwritten presumptions about the ownership and privacy of social data. Rather than that correspondence being owned by the one doing the sending, the writer, we assume on receipt of a message to our personal mobile phones that it is now ours, to do with as we please. The economy of retweeting, reposting, reblogging on social media exacerbates this: once you have sent a message, you no longer control the ways it is disseminated. This is, I think, quite different to the way in which we would treat a letter: its manner of personal address and concealment within an envelope materially signifies that it is a private document, to be shared only with care and thought. By contrast, social media commentary seems to be ours to re-present as we please. This is something we do unthinkingly in our lives, and that has been done again – albeit no doubt with a little more reflection – by the makers of the programme. What makes this programme interesting, then, is not just that it pries into the secret life of students, but that it showcases the less than secret lives that we all of us lead, where our digital correspondence with others is ripe for public spectacle.

Labels: documentary, narratology, Secret Life of Students, social media

In her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray speculates about the importance of agency in digital games. It is agency, the participation of the player in the shaping of the narrative, that differentiates video games from literary texts. Agency, she writes, "is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices." The key term in this definition is "meaningful." Action alone is not agency. As Murray points out, in a game of chance, for example, a player may perform lots of actions: rolling dice, moving pieces, spinning tops. However, a player has no agency since these actions are not meaningful in the sense of shaping the course of events, which are instead determined by luck. In a game of chess, a player may make fewer actions, but each action is more meaningful since it alone, and not luck, potentially affects the outcome of the game. In a game like poker, there is a degree of chance, but a skillful player has high agency because by strategising effectively he or she can mitigate the influence of the precise cards they are drawn.

Determining the degree of agency in these examples is pretty straightforward, and ought in principle to be quantifiable. However, to what extent can we quantify the degree of agency a player has in different video games?

In some, such as Candy Crush, one can envisage the degree of agency being quite low. Whilst there is some degree of strategy, the game is weighted most by luck - which is why it can be so infuriating to play, and so entices players to purchase bonuses which will increase their chances, such as by adding more moves. The emphasis is on repetitive action, that is eventually rewarded.

In a game like Skyrim, on the other hand, the potential for agency seems enormous. In a massive environment, we seem to have complete freedom of movement and choice. As Murray suggests, "The desire for agency in digital environments makes us impatient when our options are...limited. We want an open road with wide latitude to explore and more than one way to get somewhere." Exploration is the name of this particular game.

Somewhere between these poles might be on rails shooters or platformers. We have some degree of freedom, but are largely driven down prescribed paths. The trick of game design is all about giving us the illusion of choice.

Yet this is where agency becomes a highly problematic means of measuring the openness either of a game world or of a game's narrative. Take something like the recent Tomb Raider. This is a very cleverly designed game world, presenting itself as a vast explorable island, when in fact the player is funneled down particular pathways. Compared to Skyrim, our agency would seem to be limited - though still of course very substantial, far more so than a game like Candy Crush. However, at times the game interactions narrow to a binary state with set-piece interactions - for example, a wolf attacks us at a scripted position in the game world, and we must follow the on screen prompts to press the appropriate two or three keys. The outcome is binary, either we live or die. What, then, is the degree of agency here? On Murray's measure of agency as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices," this would seem to be a moment of high agency - perhaps even higher than the explorable game world despite being less open. These actions are intensely meaningful: they determine whether we will live or die, unlike our normal actions which allow us a degree of failure (lost health) before dying. This is why they come across as intensely satisfying, dramatic experiences in which we seem genuinely to have protected a fragile heroine. In the more open exploration, by contrast, Lara seems to be able to take an unrealistic amount of damage and in some ways is less in need of our protection.

Whilst the narrative of Tomb Raider perhaps channels the highest degree of agency through the narrowest of funnels, in Skyrim whilst we may well take pleasure from the freedom of exploration, the degree to which our explorations serve to affect the course of the narrative in any meaningful way is questionable. A game that seems to be of high agency may not actually be so. Certainly, the more we explore the game world the more likely we are to enhance the skills and equipment needed to advance the quest more easily. However, except in very limited ways (such as the civil war questline) our choices do not affect the ultimate narrative that we pursue.

What these problems suggest, I think, is that agency as it pertains to traditional games is a very different measure to agency in video games. The difference is that in the former, the degree of agency is dependent upon the amount of chance inbuilt into the game system. In a game that depends entirely on chance, such as the role of the dice, there will be no agency. By contrast, no video game that I can think of depends wholly on chance. As such, agency itself is immeasurable. Neither does agency correspond to the open-worldness of a game. Tomb Raider may have moments of higher agency when the world is actually more closed down, whilst Skyrim may seem a high agency world when in fact our actions are not necessarily meaningful in relation to the narrative. In a way, because the world is so open it gives us the chance to pursue actions that are meaningless, at least from the perspective of the game itself (from the point of view of the player, of course, even non-narrative advancing actions like crafting or taking a wander through the woods can still be meaningful, enjoyable experiences).

Agency, then, seems to offer a very limited means of measuring video game construction. Certainly, the reason we take pleasure in video games is that we perceive ourselves to be shaping the narrative and affecting the outcome of as-yet undetermined events - in this sense it is unlike the process of reading a novel. However, the extent of this shaping is always limited, not as in traditional games, by chance, but rather by the designed nature of the game world.

Labels: agency, narratology, video games