TY - JOUR
AU - TAVINOR, GRANT
AB - The interpretation of character motivations is a crucial part of the understanding of many narratives, including those found in video games. This interpretation can be complicated in video games by the player performing the role of a player‐character within the game narrative. Such performance finds the player making choices for the character and also interpreting the resulting character actions and their effect on the game's narrative. This can lead to interpretative difficulties for game narratives and their players: if a decision to act is made by the player, is it that the player's own imaginative reasons for acting warrant some narrative interpretations and exclude others? To answer this I argue that we need to investigate (a) the interactive ontology of video game narratives, (b) the notion of game playing as interpretative performance, and (c) the player‐character, an artifact through which performance is focused in narrative games. Doing so shows there to be at least two problems with the notion of the correct interpretation of narrative games. Neither of these problems entirely negates the normativity of game narratives, however, and so players are left with the problem of how they might decide which of the possible playings are warranted. I end by making some practical suggestions for the thoughtful and narratively interested game player. I Deep in winter on a deserted mountainside in the middle of a stormy night, the likable buffoon Chris discovers his friends Josh and Ashley shackled to a wall in a dark and isolated shed. A small set of rails runs up to the two, and on it is positioned a slowly moving rail cart with a large waist‐high spinning saw blade set upon it. Before Chris is a lever that changes a switch so that the cart will take the spinning blade in the direction of either Josh or Ashley. He cannot otherwise save the two, and at least one will die. A sinister voice taunts Chris: which one will you choose, your best friend or your crush? I was puzzled. What should Chris do? What should I do? This episode, from the interactive narrative video game Until Dawn, is a video game version of the philosophical trolley problem, though with less ethical subtlety and a lot more disembowelling. Until Dawn follows eight American teens as they try to understand and survive the presence of a mysterious evil force on a desolate mountain. Playing this game has the player switching between these characters, controlling their choices and actions, some of which have consequences in the developing story. When confronted by the trolley dilemma in my initial playing of the game I decided to save Ashley, and Josh was duly sawn in half, entrails flailing. But I subsequently paused to think: Why did Chris save Ashley's life? And why did I play the game in this way? Moreover, what did all of this mean for the interpretation of the game's narrative? Finally, how might this issue be complicated by the fact that Until Dawn is after all a video game, and involves the player making choices and performing actions to surmount gameplay challenges? How do the gameplay aspects of video games complicate the interpretation of their narratives? This article is concerned with the interpretation of the interactive narratives found within video games, particularly where this involves an understanding of the psychological states of the characters depicted in the work. Character motivations have always been a crucial aspect of stories, and understanding narrative works is usually if not always partly a case of understanding the motivations of the characters. Ahab's famous monomania propels not only his desperate search for the white whale, but also the course of the novel that charts this compulsion; unless the reader grasps Ahab's growing madness, he or she cannot really understand how or why the tragedy unfolds in Moby Dick. But whereas the meaning of Moby Dick partly depends on the interpretation of Ahab's explicit and implied mental states, the interpretation of a game like Until Dawn partly depends on the understanding of the explicit and implied mental states of player‐characters such as Chris—the especially complicating factor being that these states are manifested by the decisions of players during their interaction with a game. This manifestation of the video game player's performative role through player‐characters such as Chris poses a variety of problems for the understanding of video games as narrative works. This article addresses these questions by investigating the artistic ontology of video games and also the role of players in performing and interpreting such interactive works. In Section II I make some clarifying remarks on interpretation, situating the following discussion in terms of some of the familiar philosophical debates about interpretation and also addressing a potential argument against the position I develop in this article. Section III investigates the ontological and artistic machinery that makes the interactive narratives of video games a theoretical and practical possibility, paying particular attention to the concepts of interactivity, interpretative performance, and the player‐character. I argue that two classes of interpretative problem result from this distinctive ontology: those owing to the very possibility of “the correct” interpretation of interactive narratives and those practical problems facing players when they come to interpret their interactive roles in such works. Section IV addresses the former problem, arguing that both the interactive ontology of video games and the need for player self‐interpretation undermine the idea that there are singular correct interpretations of video game works. This does not fully undermine the normativity of video game narratives, however, and in section V I make some practical suggestions for the thoughtful and narratively interested gamer and how he or she might decide which of his or her possible playings is warranted. I argue that reflecting on evaluative warrant is crucial to a player's understanding of game narratives; however, because video game narratives frequently sit alongside gameplay, players need to be sensitive to the narrative warrant and also the lusory warrant of the games they play. II Interpretation is a widespread phenomenon involved in domains as diverse as scientific experiment and dream interpretation. In the context of art, interpretation involves individuals seeking the understanding of the artworks they encounter, particularly in the service of their appreciation of the work. This brief description encompasses a variety of interpretative and appreciative activities, however. For example, when we refer to artistic interpretation it is not always clear whether the concern is with attempts to understand the content of a work where some of its details remain only implied or with the appreciation of the meaning of the work, including its motifs, themes, and other artistic devices. Much of what I say here about video games will focus on the former aspect—that is, interpreting just what is occurring in the video game narrative where it is ambiguous or unrepresented, particularly where these details concern player‐character motivations—but inasmuch as the meaning of the work turns on these details, I expect the following discussion to have implications for the work meaning of video games, too. A second issue concerns the aims of interpretation. Does interpreting a work aim at a singular correct interpretation, as argued by Monroe C. Beardsley (1970), or might a theory of artistic interpretation acknowledge the possibility of multiple coherent and valid interpretations and see choosing between differing interpretations as properly motivated by maximizing the artistic enjoyment and value to be found in a work (Davies 2006)? This familiar issue is also relevant to the interpretation of video games, and I argue here that regardless of what may be the case in other forms of art, video game works surely do have multiple and perhaps equally correct interpretations, partly because of the potential for varied displays to be realized from a single video game work. Finally, when we speak of an interpretation we might refer to the interpretation provided by the performer of a work, especially when our concern is with the performing arts. Here an interpretation is characterized as a performative act, intermediate between an artist and audience, where—through being constrained by the script or notation of the artwork—performers invest additional artistic qualities into the actions or objects they produce. This sense of the term is clearly relevant in the current context given the prima facie resemblance of the playing of some video games to performances in art forms such as theater. In both, for example, the vehicle of the performance may be a character in a work of fiction, and the interpretation may focus on this character's hidden inner motivations. Much of the following investigates the role such interpretative performances have in narrative video games. The preceding discussion may suggest one obvious objection to my argument. Given the ambiguities within the concept and that interpretation serves a variety of functions within and beyond art, it may be that the player activities described here are not really cases of narrative or artistic interpretation at all. In the example from Until Dawn, perhaps the player's concern is not with interpreting and enacting Chris's motivations in order to appreciate the story of the game, but rather with performing actions strategically designed to achieve the optimal gameplay outcome. It is true that much of the reasoning and decision making of video game players is focused on meeting the challenges of gameplay, but I hope that the following discussion will illustrate how this does not exhaust the interpretative activities of players and that many of these are directed toward understanding a game's narrative. What this does mean, however, is that because gameplay and narrative have different evaluative standards—winning a game is something quite different from understanding a story—care is needed if we are to understand how these differing normative contexts coexist within the medium of video gaming. I return to this issue in the final section of this article. III So how is it possible that a player can manifest a character during the playing of a video game and subsequently interpret this character's actions in a way that contributes to the content and meaning of the game's story? Three aspects of video games are crucial here: the interactivity of the medium, the interpretative performance of the player, and the role of the player‐character. iii.a. Interactivity It is increasingly common to see claims that video games are works of interactive art (Tavinor 2009; Gaut 2010). Interactive works are not limited to video games, or even computer‐based works (Lopes 2009). According to an early definition of interactivity formulated by Dominic Lopes (2001) and refined by Berys Gaut, “a work is interactive just in case it authorizes that its audience's actions partly determine its instances and their features” (2010, 143). Audiences of interactive works interact with those works to make decisions that realize the features of the display of the work, but additionally they attend to the resulting artistic features of the display. As a consequence of this, in such work the user—or what in games it is more natural to call the “player”—combines the traditional roles of performer and audience (Gaut 2010, 144; Lopes 2009, 82–83). The broad outlines of this theory of interactivity have been employed by a number of philosophers to account for video games, but it should be noted that there is not universal agreement with this theory of interactivity (Smuts 2009). It is a promising account, however, and I will put it to use here. Exactly how video games embody interactivity is a complicated story that is beyond the scope of the current article, but I have argued elsewhere that it is likely to involve the combination of an underlying structural “algorithm” and a set of artistic assets—including audiovisual representations, fictions, and narrative content—that are displayed to players contingent on their input into a control device (Tavinor 2011). In this sense, a video game with an interactive narrative is one where the player performs actions that partially determine the features of the narrative content of a game. Not all game narratives are interactive in this sense. A game such as BioShock Infinite, for example, even though it involves a great deal of fictive interactivity—including the fictive interactivity specific to gameplay and also that follows more generally from the player's ability to influence what is fictional in the gameworld—provides a largely fixed narrative because this player performance has very little influence on the game's story elements. Furthermore, in many instances the narrative portions of a video game are composed of noninteractive films—cut‐scenes—that are interspersed through the gameplay (Tavinor 2009, 112). Until Dawn has a surprising amount of interactive content and counts as one of the more impressive interactive narratives of recent times. Following the thematic clichés of its noninteractive genre—teen horror films—the youthfully exuberant protagonists of Until Dawn are being hunted by a nameless evil and several may die during the course of the story. Whether or not they do die is determined by the decisions and actions of the player. These actions are tracked by what is called a “butterfly effect” game mechanic, and the player is alerted to precisely when he or she has made a decision that influences the course of the narrative. For example, in one scene early in the game, choosing to shoot a squirrel with a rifle leads to a moment of danger shortly afterward. These interactive aspects of Until Dawn can be surprising and indirect: some of the butterfly effects in the game are rather distant from their initiating actions, and a decision made much earlier in the game can have a surprising effect later on. As a result it is often a puzzle to understand the causal structure of the game's narrative algorithm. As well as affecting the ultimate survival of the video game's characters, the butterfly effect mechanic also allows player choices to affect the relationships between the various player‐controlled characters. Until Dawn also indulges in another thematic staple of teen horror—nauseating juvenile romance—and, so, many of the decisions that the player makes have ramifications for how the various characters get along with each other. Finally, Until Dawn also employs several surreal interludes in which the player‐character interacts with a mysterious psychoanalyst to determine the objects of his or her fears. So, for example, if the player answers that he is afraid of cockroaches during one of these interludes, the game will depict cockroaches in the fictional world, so tailoring the narrative content to the specific fears of the player.1 iii.b. Interpretative Performance Sometimes found in conjunction with these claims of interactivity is the argument that the playing of such video games counts as a kind of artistic performance (Gaut 2010, 144–146). At a basic level the player's performance in a video game involves making decisions and actions that change the fiction of the game in various respects. Most simply, the player may move the character around the gameworld through input into the control device. Other performative aspects involve meeting the challenges of gameplay; Until Dawn makes effective use of “quick time events,” a mode of context sensitive control that asks the player to respond to events in the gameworld by making specific control inputs, either in a limited time or to a particular timing. The narrative performances in Until Dawn exist as decisions—often time pressured—where the player must push the control stick in the direction of one of two options for action. Though they have the similar effect of a performer making things fictional, these acts are far from the types of performances found in live action drama and other performance arts, and one may thus question whether they amount to genuine artistic performances. Unlike the theatrical player, the game player does not aim to produce a performance specified in a script, and indeed he or she may not even know the effect his or her performance will have on the fiction. This may not be enough to rule out game playing as a kind of artistic performance, however. In his book on the cinematic arts, Berys Gaut argues that there are at least two aspects to artistic performance: “compliance” and “interpretation” (Gaut 2010, 145–146). Compliant aspects of performance are those that must be actioned if the performance is to count as an instance of the work. Interpretative performance involves performing and generating features beyond those required, in a way that might “suggest or ground a critical interpretation” (Gaut 2010, 145). Suitably tailored, Gaut believes this distinction is useful for reflecting on the genuine role of artistic performance in video gaming (and I believe that it may also serve a useful role in the present discussion). Gaut notes that much of the compliant performance of games is “automated” such as where the player must perform certain actions for the continuation of the game, often during objective based gameplay. Unless one complies with the implicit instructions of Tetris to fit the shaped blocks into appropriately shaped spaces, the game will not last very long. In a narrative video game, automated compliance involves responding to the decisions prompted by the work, thus generating one of the work's possible displays. Automated compliance is made possible by the algorithmic structure of the interactive work, which is designed to produce an instance of the work via the interaction of the player. Gaut notes that “automated compliance explains why the audience need not know many of the features of the interactive work, unlike the performer of a traditional art form. …” (Gaut 2010, 146). So while the video game player does not draw on a script to produce an instance of the work, his or her successful interaction with the algorithmic structure of the game generates its display. The most interesting part of a video game playing, from an artistic perspective, is the “interpretative performance” where the player explores a game to discover its interactive potential in a way that sheds light on the game's content and meaning. Game players often go beyond what is necessary to produce an instance of the game, exploring and experimenting with the game to tease out content that might cast further light on the meaning of the work or its interactive structure. So, for example, in a narrative game one might invest extra effort searching for clues to the meaning of the work: it is now common for games to hide plot elements to reward motivated players with richer experiences of the game and its narrative.2 Such interpretative performance frequently involves playing the game repeatedly to explore how different decisions affect the world and deliver different stories. If the video game work is, as I have suggested above, partly composed of an interactive algorithm, then interpreting the meaning of the work as a whole—rather than just one of its possible displays—will naturally depend on such repeated playings. This is because it may simply not be evident from a single playing that a player choice did have an impact on the displayed structure or what that precise effect was. The video game Dishonored provides a nice example of how such explorative repeated playings are needed to grasp the meaning of a video game. If one plays this game violently, then the algorithm provides a much bleaker and more chaotic world and narrative than if the player attempts to avoid violence in his or her play. But to really see this effect, one must play the game, or at least some of its sections, repeatedly. As a result, it is natural to interpret Dishonored as expressing the theme that our environments are a product of our own behavior, and, more specifically, that violence begets violence. None of this necessarily means that video games are a performing art in the sense that chamber music or theater are performing arts. Of course, many other art forms can be described as involving performances without thereby counting as performing arts. And performance may be rather more widespread or central in the arts than is sometimes thought. For example, in his account of the ontology of art and performance David Davies claims that art works should be identified with the generative performances that give rise to the perceptual objects we typically but erroneously think of as the art work (Davies 2004). These latter objects are instead conceived of as a “focus of appreciation” brought into existence by artists and performers—though both are now considered performers of a kind—for the purpose of making the artistic act available to audiences. If we follow Davies's lead, the interpretative performances under question here may not be a reason to think that video games are a performing art, but rather a feature that they have in virtue of being a form of art more generally. The specific role of performance in video games is a topic which clearly demands more work. iii.c. Player‐characters The last thing I need to introduce is how, in practice, this interactivity and interpretative performance is manifested in games where there is a player‐character. I have argued elsewhere that the player‐character acts as an “epistemic and agential proxy” for the player, allowing her to fictionally “step into” the worlds of video games to play games and also to experience a narrative (Tavinor 2009, 61–85). Not all video games have player‐characters, and where they do not the performance of the player may not be subject to the kind of interpretative activities that are the concern here.3 Nevertheless, player‐characters seem to be a key vehicle for the player's performative contribution to the narratives of video games. The term ‘player‐character’ is interesting in that it runs two apparent individuals together, one real and one fictional, and the apparent relationship between the real player and his or her fictional character is that of identity. It is entirely natural to speak in a way that attributes identity between the player and her character: a player may say “You killed me,” when his or her character dies in a competitive first‐person shooter, or, when asked by an onlooker who he or she is in the game, a player may point to a character and say “That's me, the elven thief with purple hair and sparkly boots.” This apparent identity courts metaphysical confusion, of course. Indeed, the title of this article—“What's My Motivation?”—immediately invokes the problem of to whom this first person possessive refers. Is the reference to a player's motivation to make narrative decisions in a performance or to the fictional character's motivation to make choices in the fictional world? I will have something to say on this ambiguity in the final section of this article. Ultimately the apparent and potentially confusing identity of player and character derives from what such fictions prescribe that players imagine about their own role in the gameworld. The player does not really share an identity with a gameworld character because there is no person‐like thing for the player to be identical with. The teens in Until Dawn do not exist, and so it is not the case that there is a person in a gameworld and that the player is identical in some sense with this person. Rather, there exist representations of a fictional person, and on the basis of these the player imagines adopting a role within a fictional world. Video games are not alone in allowing such fictive identities as they may also exist where a person authors a fictional story in which he or she is a character. Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin argue that many video games sit within the class of what they refer to as “self‐involving fictions,” which are interactive fictions that in an important sense are “about those who consume them” (Robson and Meskin 2016). Video games augment these kinds of self‐involving fictions by prescribing an interactive means of modifying the fictive representations and thus generating new fictional content through the act of playing the game. The player‐character is a subsequent focus for performance and its interpretation because it provides the locus of player “affordances.” An ‘affordance,’ a concept drawn from the psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977) that now appears frequently in games studies, refers to what a player “can and cannot do inside a game” (Sharp 2014). When the game involves a player‐character, many of the game's affordances become embodied as actions and decisions of a fictional person—or zombie, alien, or goat given that the player‐character need not be human. So, in Until Dawn, the interactive affordances of the player‐character are depicted as the actions and decisions of one of a number of mostly normal teenagers dealing with a mysterious evil. The resulting game and its narrative comprise what these characters do in the situations that confront them. This brings player‐character psychology within the purview of the interpretation of the game as we may begin to wonder why a character performed the actions that he did within the game's fiction. The question of why a player‐character performed some action in a given playing is also germane to the meaning of the resulting narrative and at least part of the “interpretative performance” of narrative games such as Until Dawn concerns enacting and interpreting player‐character motivations. IV Notwithstanding the well‐known interpretative problems with noninteractive narratives, interactive video game narratives pose special interpretative problems. In most narratives the psychological states of fictional characters may remain merely implied by the representations in the work, requiring the elaborative interpretation of the reader or viewer. Some narratives may even remain ambiguous because of difficulties in understanding or deciding between alternative character motivations warranted by what is represented in the work. But while the representational ambiguity of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw may lead us to wonder whether the work is a conventional ghost story or a rather more radical psychological story, players of video games can be faced with an additional problem: the work is not represented until players make the decisions that are offered them by a game's algorithm. Provided with a number of narrative affordances by the game, the player makes decisions and performs actions, and the game algorithm registers these to produce a well‐formed instance of the narrative. As a result the work itself does not have a unique or settled content before playing: rather it is individual displays that do, and the content of these displays are made concrete though the decisions of the player. As noted, Gaut discusses the notion of “compliant performance”; complying with a narrative game such as Until Dawn entails playing the game in a way that produces one among a set of possible playings. There is a strong temptation to play the game multiple times to find what the possible playings are, however, and this constitutes one kind of interpretative performance possible with the game. Having killed several of the player‐characters in an initial playing of Until Dawn, a player may want to see the ending in which no characters die. To do so, he or she may craft her decisions to lead to this desired outcome. Arguably, a good understanding of a game like Until Dawn will only be available to those who have played it multiple times and so have a sense of the real interactive potential of the work. Thus the first problem with interpreting the meaning of interactive game narratives is that games have multiple and possibly divergent playings. A second complication for settling the meaning of the game narrative stems from the second of the dual roles inherent in the performance of interactive works: the appreciation of the playing, particularly the interpretation of the player‐character's actions in the narrative. Like traditional narratives, what is represented in a game may leave character motivations undetermined, requiring the elaborative interpretation of the audience. But given that what is depicted in interactive works stems partly from the decisions of the player, interpreting the characters within a game narrative may draw not only on the features actually represented by the game, but also on the player‐character's merely imagined reasons for acting in the gameworld. This interpretation may occur prior to the player making a decision—a player may ask which of the actions her character would or should make—but also after the results of the character's action in the gameworld become known. Different players will have their characters do different things for different reasons, and settling on an interpretation will naturally draw on potentially idiosyncratic reasons for acting. So the second problem is that even for playings of Until Dawn with identical endings (in which just the same characters live and die), there may be multiple “correct” interpretations depending on how players interpret the motivations and actions of the characters leading up to that ending. Of course, a narrative playing cannot have just any meaning the player wants to attribute to it; the interpretation of the player is constrained by what is allowed by or contained in the game's algorithmic and artistic assets. Until Dawn represents a great deal of its narrative content, including numerous facts about player‐character motivations, and much of it is nonambiguous. Moreover, there are incorrect interpretations of Until Dawn: none of the possible endings of the game are happy ones, as the events of the story leave the characters traumatized even if they survive. An interpretation of the story as having a happy ending is ruled out by what is explicitly presented in the game's credits roll. At the end of the game, the survivors in the story (if there are any) reflect on the events on the mountain, often expressing regret for the decisions they made. So, while games allow players to affect the course of the story, the narrative normativity of other forms of narrative where authorial decisions place limits on interpretation still exists. Until Dawn still leaves plenty of wiggle room for imagined motivations, however, staying largely silent on what characters are thinking (silent enough anyway, that players can themselves settle this through their interpretative performance). Some games leave this interpretative narrative performance extraordinarily open, and in some cases the player seems wholly free to construct her own narrative because the game authorizes this free activity. The temptation to tell your own story in the sandbox game Minecraft is strong, for example. Minecraft is a world‐building game without a pre‐authored narrative.4 But in this game it is entirely natural to tell stories about how a game progresses. Remembering that in interactive works such as video games, playing comprises the dual role of performer and audience, that these narratives are primarily told to oneself is no bar to seeing them as narratives of the game. In the first world I played—a multiplayer game in which I explored a world with a partner playing on another computer—I was separated from my partner and became lost in the huge gameworld. I spent a frustrating few days of gameplay exploring and trying to find my way home (and often becoming distracted). I built temporary shelters and frequently thought I had found a familiar landmark, only to be frustrated. But one day I walked over the crest of a hill and saw my original home before me, my playing partner still tending to our gardens. The episode demanded to be interpreted as the story of an epic voyage and return, and I have subsequently told it as such. If Minecraft is a narrative game, then the control it places over the player is very loose indeed; the idea of a correct narrative interpretation of Minecraft seems near incoherent, because what narrative there is in the game owes almost entirely to the interpretative performance of the players, including the central interpretative issue of what they take “themselves” to be doing in the gameworld. It may also be that Minecraft is simply a narratively weak game because it lacks the kind of narrative interactivity or responsiveness seen in games such as Until Dawn. Minecraft might be better understood as a prop for telling stories, rather than a storytelling medium itself. While it is extraordinarily open in terms of what can fictionally occur in the gameworld, Minecraft lacks the kind of interactive narrative framing seen in Until Dawn: there are no branching plot lines, the fiction does not engage with narrative tropes such as love triangles or revenge plots, and it also lacks a clear sense that some of the fictional events or features were placed in the interactive structure for purely narrative reasons.5 V If we restrict ourselves to considering interactive narratives with more or less correct playings and which place some constraints on interpretation, then we are faced with the practical question of just how players are to judge the warrant of their performance and interpretation of the player‐character and hence how they judge the meaning of the narrative where it is affected by the motivations attributed to the player‐character. Because of the differing levels of narrative freedom and interactivity offered by games, I suspect it is going to be difficult if not impossible to derive general rules for the warrant of narrative interpretative performances in games. It is possible to identify some of the factors that motivate player‐character performance in a way that affects narrative interpretation, however. First, a point of clarification about interpretative perspectives is necessary here. Games demand that players adopt multiple interpretive perspectives on the player‐character in order to discern the warrant of the motivations they attribute to those characters. In Until Dawn, most of the interpretation is couched in the third person and concerns the motivations of the observed fictional characters. Indeed, much of the playing and interpretation of video games involves considering the gameworld characters in the mode that traditional fictive forms such as film ask us to attend to their characters. In Until Dawn the characters are sufficiently detailed and distinct to sustain an external interpretative consideration in that we naturally judge what kind of people they are and what their characters and motivations are. That the player switches between these characters through the course of the game probably undermines the kind of first‐person identification discussed earlier in this article. In other games there is little temptation to adopt this third‐person attitude, and treating the player‐character in the first person predominates. In such games the player may also couch interpretative concerns in the first person. In Minecraft, the player‐character has so few distinctive qualities and the player is directly responsible for so much of the character's behavior that there is almost no reason to question his or her actions from a third‐person perspective. In this case the player‐character seems almost entirely the epistemic and agential shell referred to earlier. The resulting description and interpretation of the player‐character's activities is made almost exclusively in the first person; the question is what I am doing in the world, and what my motivations are.6 Many games necessitate switching between these perspectives. In a game like the post‐apocalyptic The Last of Us, while a player may tell us what he is doing in a gameworld, he can also switch to an external perspective on the player‐character of the gameworld, Joel, and inquire into the qualities of this character. In The Last of Us, the switch to third person often occurs during the cut scenes of the game where the narrative is the principal interest, while a first‐person perspective is adopted during gameplay sections. An obvious source of player motivation is the gameplay itself. Much of what the player‐character does in a gameworld is done to meet the lusory challenges set by gameplay: why did Nathan Drake kill all those South American mercenaries? Because to finish that level in Uncharted, one simply must kill all those South American mercenaries. But an interesting question here is the extent to which such player actions even allow for or prompt the narrative interpretation of gameworld character motivations. If the reason why the player‐character Nathan Drake killed all those South American mercenaries was for the player to make it to the end of the level, interpreting this action in narrative terms may be redundant or may even lead to interpretative difficulties. In Uncharted, actually trying to interpret Nathan's full range of behaviors should naturally lead to the conclusion that he is a psychopathic murderer and not the likeable easygoing explorer he is depicted as in much of the game's narrative. In this case what is warranted by the narrative of the game seems out of step with what is required to successfully play the game, this being a case of so‐called “ludonarrative dissonance” (Hocking 2007). Ludonarrative dissonance is a problem of internal coherence within games that occurs where the structural features generated by gameplay—principally, the rules and objectives—clash with or contradict the narrative aspects of the game. Let us return to the example of Until Dawn and the potential in the game for the player's actions to determine who lives and who dies. Many players will just try to save all the characters, treating Until Dawn simply as a game, where saving characters from death is a standard objective and where not doing so prompts the familiar phrase “game over.” Some players probably suspect that the case in which all characters survive counts as the “real” narrative ending of the game or amounts to “winning” the game. But neither of these intuitions seems appropriate. First, playing an interactive narrative with multiple endings and taking one of the endings to be privileged as the real ending seems to be a case of a category mistake where the standards of noninteractive narratives (with their singular endings) are incorrectly applied to interactive narratives (which may have multiple endings). All of the endings of Until Dawn are real endings in the sense of being warranted by the work. How they differ is really only in their emotional valence, appeal to the player, or interpretative coherence and artistic merit. Having all of the characters killed or none of them are equally warranted playings, given that the game not only allows these outcomes but adds additional material during the credits roll on the narrative significance of the character deaths. Secondly, saving all of the teens should not really be seen as “winning the game,” because doing so amounts to a further category mistake of seeking the typical features of a game (that one typically plays to win and character death counts as failure) with those of a narrative (where a tragedy and death can be a desirable outcome). The lusory mode of playing video games risks ignoring the potential for narrative interpretation provided by the game, where a playing leading to a player‐character death may be a warranted playing because of how the death contributes to the narrative. One thing that is evident here, then, is that in playing some games there is the potential to confuse the lusory warrant of a game—what the game prescribes as winning objectives, for example—with its narrative warrant.7 Or it perhaps may be that these dual normative factors currently sit uneasily alongside each other in some video games. As a result of the mixed gaming and narrative categorial conventions present in Until Dawn, category mistakes in this case may be particularly tempting. Some players may be motivated by rather naïve responses to the game, making decisions based on what they want for the characters or how they feel about them, perhaps attempting to bring about desirable outcomes for the fictional characters involved. Perhaps then I saved Ashley because she is basically sympathetic as a character. Alternatively, of course, players may try to kill off the characters, engaging in the type of contrary play that is now well established in gaming. If it is possible to act sadistically in a game, it is almost guaranteed that many players will behave that way. But again, simply trying to save or kill characters based on how one feels about them may not give a full appreciation of the potential in an interactive narrative. The need for the consideration of the narrative warrant of playings arises most clearly where the player does reflect on the motivations of the player‐character within the gameworld and where these thoughts do impact on the player's subsequent performance of the game. A more narratively sensitive playing is to have the character behave not simply to produce the optimal gameplay or fictional outcome, but to behave as the character in that actual situation might. Many players desire to play to character, acknowledging in their performance all the character traits, motivations, and beliefs of the character they control. In this case—and I think this was partly my motivation—Chris saves Ashley because of his growing romantic love for her. Until Dawn uses several techniques to encourage this kind of “in‐character” playing. As each character is introduced in the game, their personality traits are represented to the player (Chris is depicted as charitable, curious, and funny). This is not necessarily the clumsy storytelling device it might be in a noninteractive narrative; rather the personality traits ground and prompt the players when they come to make the narrative decisions in the game. “In‐character” playing is also prompted by how Until Dawn graphically depicts the moment of decision. When the narrative decisions are made the game switches to a close‐up of the character's face, and his or her eyes track between the choices on the screen as the player moves the control stick between them. Presented with this moment of vacillation, it is hard not to wonder what the character is or should be thinking. Playing to character may also acknowledge the epistemic situation of the character, and so players may also play in a way that acknowledges that the character does not know certain things. In fact, I was pretty sure that all was not as it seemed in the dilemma described at the beginning of this article and that my eventual choice would not have the messy consequences for Josh that Chris believed it would. However, not being privy to my suspicions about the narrative, Chris's decision could not take account of this information. This kind of “in‐character” playing may thus actually frustrate a fictional character's depicted or implied interests (especially if the character lacks self‐awareness) but in a way that is in the best interest of the narrative. Naturally then, playing to character demands that the player interpret the character to see which playings are warranted by the work. Playing to character demands attention paid to what is represented or implied about that character's beliefs, motivations, and epistemic situation, and each of these considerations may place normative constraints on playings. For this reason, for some playings it may then be sensible to ask whether the character really would behave that way. Players may desire to act as the character in the gameworld would, but clearly players are also sometimes motivated to meet the genre expectations of a game. Until Dawn is a clear case of this given its indulgence of teen horror genre clichés. In the game it is possible to save all of the main characters. But does saving all of the characters really serve the story? I was happy to have several of my player‐characters die when I played Until Dawn. While this may partly owe to how disagreeable some of the characters are, it also likely owes to my desire to play to genre; and in this genre it is common for even main characters to die in horrible ways. A playing of the game in which some (or all) of the characters are killed is a warranted playing, given that these outcomes are authorized by the game. And Until Dawn may be a more satisfying narrative if at least some of the player‐characters are killed, because the obnoxious or clueless way they behave typically warrants death within the teen horror genre. It was for this reason, perhaps, that I was ultimately not greatly upset—indeed, I was almost pleased—when my clumsy play in one section of Until Dawn directly led to Chris's decapitation at the claws of a horrible monster on that dark and deserted winter mountainside.8 REFERENCES Beardsley , Monroe C. 1970 . The Possibility of Criticism . Wayne State University Press . Davies , David . 2004 . Art as Performance . Oxford : Blackwell Publishing . Davies , Stephen . 2006 “ Author's Intentions, Literary Interpretations, and Literary Value .” British Journal of Aesthetics 46 : 223 – 247 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Gaut , Berys . 2010 . A Philosophy of Cinematic Art . Cambridge University Press . Gibson , J. J. 1977 . “ The Theory of Affordances .” In Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology , edited by Robert Shaw and John Bransford, 67 – 82 . Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Hocking , Clint . 2007 . “Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock,” Click Nothing Blog, http://www.clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html. Lopes , Dominic McIver . 2001 . “ The Ontology of Interactive Art .” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35 ( 4 ): 65 – 81 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Lopes , Dominic McIver . 2009 . A Philosophy of Computer Art . London : Routledge . Robson , Jon , and Aaron Meskin. 2016 . “ Video Games as Self‐Involving Fictions .” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 : 165 – 177 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Sharp , John. 2014 . “ Dimensionality .” In The Routledge Companion to Games Studies , edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 91 – 98 . New York : Routledge . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Smuts , Aaron . 2009 . “ What Is Interactivity? ” Journal of Aesthetic Education 43 ( 4 ): 53 – 73 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Tavinor , Grant . 2009 . The Art of Videogames . Malden, MA : Wiley‐Blackwell . Tavinor , Grant . 2011 . “ Video Games as Mass Art ,” Contemporary Aesthetics 9 : http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=616. OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Footnotes 1. There is an obvious ambiguity here: just whose fears do the player's choices reflect? The player, of course, may really be afraid of cockroaches; but equally he or she need not be, and this fear might more properly be attributed to the character. 2. Gone Home, a narrative game developed by The Fullbright Company, is a good recent example where curious play is narratively rewarding and where especially obscure or hard to access content can add significantly to the meaning of the narrative. 3. There is a great deal more that could be said about the nature and function of video game player‐characters and how they are involved in and prompt narrative performance and interpretation, but space limits the discussion I can provide. There are also some very puzzling cases where a player's epistemic and agential proxy does not look particularly character‐like: in I am Bread, developed by Bossa Studios, the player is cast into the role of a slice of bread confronting all of the daily challenges facing such freshly baked entities. 4. Minecraft has recently had a story mode released, though it is essentially a different game where the player navigates a branching story through quick time events. The similarity to the original Minecraft is in terms of artistic assets and design. 5. I'd like to thank an anonymous referee of this journal for pointing out this possibility. 6. Another telling fact about the story mode recently introduced for Minecraft is how the first‐person player attitude of the original Minecraft is almost completely replaced by a third‐person interpretative attitude. 7. Fictional warrant, or what the player is warranted to think fictional of the gameworld, is another form of interpretative warrant that I have not discussed here. I have argued elsewhere that the fictions of video games have at least a dual purpose, in depicting both the gameplay and narratives of video games (2009). Discovering what the lusory and narrative warrant in a given game is will partly depend on what we are warranted to make‐believe is fictional of the gameworld. The precise relationship between fictive, narrative, and lusory warrant is likely to be complicated, however, for while many of the ludic features of video games are specified by what is fictional in the gameworld, there are also nonfictional features such as scores, instructions, and nonfictive on‐screen elements that may contribute to the representation and playing of these games. The delineation of the various normative domains within video games is another topic that is in need of further research. 8. I am thankful for the feedback I received when I presented an earlier version of this article at the 2015 American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting in Savannah, Georgia. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - What's My Motivation? Video Games and Interpretative Performance
JF - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12334
DA - 2017-02-08
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/what-s-my-motivation-video-games-and-interpretative-performance-iej4mJnE7M
SP - 23
EP - 33
VL - 75
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -