Friday, October 12, 2007
Looking at storytelling in video games
 David Jones, instructor in Liberal Arts, is willing to bet that his students know the story of the character Master Chief in the video game Halo better than they know The Epic of Gilgamesh. “Easily,” he said. “They understand games better than they can Shakespeare, which is becoming foreign to them.” His colleagues in the Department of English would be horrified by this, one assumes. “And in my deepest heart, I might agree,” he said. “But that’s also selling video games short. They’re increasingly not just toys for kids.” Jones will present the College of Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium, “Grand Theft Narrative: Hijacking the Theoretical Gang War,” at 3:30 p.m. Friday, October 26 in Kleymeyer Hall in the Liberal Arts Center. “Basically, the idea is whether or not video games can tell a story, and whether or not they will tell a story the same way a book will tell a story,” he said. Jones, 29, grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s. “My generation was the first to grow up with video games. As an English major in college, it dawned on me that the games I played were doing some of the things I was reading about in my classes. Gaming is a different media form that tries to tell stories in its own way using conventions that books use, but doing something different from them.” The key difference between the two is gaming’s interactivity. “Books don’t change unless you translate or reedit them. The language itself only changes within the reader’s head. Games, on the other hand, flatly demand that the person playing the game go in and change what the game is doing and, especially in recent years, they’ve gotten sophisticated enough that they are allowing the game player to change the story of the game itself. From a technical standpoint, they are doing it in a way that demands something books can’t.” The “gang war” of the title is between narratologists, who study narrative structure in story, and ludologists, who study games as cultural artifacts in and of themselves. From a ludological standpoint, game studies and English should be wholly separate entities, Jones said, but he thinks English theory can be useful to games. In narratological theory, a narrative includes story time (when and where a story takes place) and discourse time (when it is told). “Narrative theory can’t apply to games because the concept of story time is sometimes very different in a game than it is in a book,” Jones said. “Games demand a new idea of how stories are told.” His colloquium will seek to resolve the two. The College of Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium is a free lecture series featuring faculty research in the College of Liberal Arts. For more information, contact Dr. Teresa Huerta, coordinator, at 812/465-7053. Wendy Knipe Bredhold News and Information Services wkbredhold@usi.edu 812/461-5259 |
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