Lecture 2 CS148/248: Interactive Narrative UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps248/Spring2007 [email protected] 10 April 2007
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Transcript Lecture 2 CS148/248: Interactive Narrative UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps248/Spring2007 [email protected] 10 April 2007
Lecture 2
CS148/248: Interactive Narrative
UC Santa Cruz
School of Engineering
www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps248/Spring2007
[email protected]
10 April 2007
Drama
McKee describes the dramatic story, the story told by
Hollywood screenplays and “non-experimental”
stageplays
Well formed plot arcs (structure)
Intensity (nothing extraneous, distilled, boiled down)
Mimesis (telling a story by showing)
For many of us, our implicit model of what makes a
good story is informed by our experience of cinema
Drama is communicated through action
Why might this be a useful model for interactive narrative?
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Dramatic structure
Drama selects key moments from characters’ life stories
The story told vs. life story
Distillation of the essence of life
Structure is a selection of events from characters’ life stories strategically
composed to express specific emotions and points of view
Story event
A story even turns (changes) a story value
Story value
Universal binary qualities of human experience
Alive/dead, love/hate, freedom/slavery, courage/cowardice, wisdom/stupidity, …
Conflict
Change in the story value is achieved through conflict – values shouldn’t change
through accident or coincidence
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Scenes and beats
Scene
A story event that changes at least one value (from
negative to positive or vice-versa)
No exposition – information should always be
communicated through value change
Test of “sceneness” – could the story event be expressed
in a unity of time and space?
Beat – action/reaction pairs that shape the turning of
the scene
The smallest unit of value change
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Sequences, acts and stories
A sequence is a series of scenes (typically 2 to 5) that
culminates with greater impact than any previous scene
Each scene turns its own value
The sequence turns a greater value that subordinates the others
An act is a series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene
causing a major reversal of values, more powerful than any
preceeding scene or sequence
The story, in the story climax, brings about absolute and
irreversible change
The audience can’t imagine any change past this
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The Protagonist
The protagonist is the central character, providing a point of
view and motive force for the action
The protagonist might be plural (e.g. representing a whole social class)
or multiple (intertwining multiple points of view)
The protagonist must be willful – no passive protagonists
Has a conscious, and potentially an unconscious object of desire
The protagonist must have the capacities to pursue the object
of desire and must have at least a chance
Without the possibility of achievement the audience looses interest
The protagonist has the will and capacity to pursue the object
of desire to the limit
The story will build to a final action beyond which the
audience can not imagine another
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Empathy and identification
The audience must be able to empathize with the
protagonist
This is not the same as sympathy – doesn’t mean you like
the character
In Aristotelian drama, empathy results in
identification – the audience experiences what the
protagonist experiences
The drama takes the audience on an emotional
journey through the values explored by the story
The audience then experiences catharsis (a purgation
of the emotions)
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Conflict
The will of the protagonist must be resisted
The protagonist takes the minimal, reasonable action to achieve her
goal, but provokes antagonism
This is different from real life – most of the time our actions don’t
provoke antagonism (though we may encounter resistance)
Inner conflicts
Mind, body, emotions
Personal conflicts
Family, lovers, friends
Extra-personal conflicts
Social institutions, individuals in society (social roles), physical
environment
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The gap
Conflict happens where the subjective and objective realms
touch
The protagonist has an expectation of the results of her
action, but the provoked conflict violates expectations
The first action of the protagonist results in this gap – the
second action now involves risk (there’s something to lose)
As actions result in gaps, the ante must be upped, with the
“minimal and reasonable action” becoming bigger and more
being put at risk
The character’s desire must be strong enough to take us to
the end of the story (maximum risk, irrevocable change)
To create emotional truth for your character, you must write
from the inside out, asking yourself “if I were this character in
these circumstances, what would I do?”
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Poor man’s semiotics
Semiology is concerned with the phenomenon of meaning: how
it is that something (e.g. a mark on a page, an article of
clothing, a dish in a meal), can have meaning for somebody
A sign is the fundamental unit of meaning and consists of two
parts: the signifier and the signified
The signifier is the uninterpreted object or sensory impression
that, by convention, means something
The signified is the meaning, which is always a mental
representation
In written language, “cat” is a signifier, and the mental image those
marks bring to mind the signified
In the language of highway codes, the color red is a signifier, and the
mental image of stopping a vehicle the signified
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The sign
“cat”
signified
Plane of Content
Plane of Expression
signifier
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Syntagm and paradigm
Signs can be combined into complex configurations call
syntagms
Linguistic signs can be combined into sentences and paragraphs
Cinematic signs can be combined into scenes
A paradigm defines a potential structure of associative fields –
each field defines signs that can play the same role within a
syntagm
Example: The Food System
Syntagms are specific meals
The paradigm groups foodstuffs into entrees, deserts, salads, etc.
A sign system defines the legal syntagms that can be
constructed – includes the paradigm
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Connotation
Connotation occurs when one semiotic system becomes the
expression plane of another
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Meta-language
Meta-language occurs when one semiotic system becomes the
content plane of another
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Poor man’s narratology
Narratology – a structuralist analysis of narrative
Enabling move: separating the “objective” story from the presented
story
Story/fabula – The objective sequence of events that
constitutes the story
Discourse/sjuzhet – The presentation of the story (always
involves manipulation)
Diegesis – The story world, the time-space continuum of the
story (the story is a sequences of events in the diegetic world)
Narration – the mechanics by which the discourse is produced
from the story (e.g. third vs. first person etc.)
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The narrative situation
Diegetic universe
1
2
3
Story
4
5
Focalization
Discourse
1
5
prolepsis
(flash-forward)
3
2
4
analepsis
(flash-back)
Interpretation
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Narrative, Media, Modes
In order to be able to talk about interactive narrative, one must be able to
talk about narrative in different media (since various forms of interactive
narrative will constitute new media)
Classical narratology tends towards privileging specific media
Radical media relativism argues that signifier can’t be separated from signified –
therefore there’s no way to talk about “narrative” in the abstract
Other theorists have so generalized the notion of narrative, that it ceases
to form a coherent category
Narratives of identity
Grand narratives of history
Cultural narrative
Ryan’s goal in this chapter is to define a notion of narrative powerful
enough to define a coherent category, but general enough to be medium
independent
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Narrative dimensions
Consider “narrativeness” a scalar value (more or less
narrative) rather than a boolean value (is or is not a narrative)
Do this by defining 8 narrative dimensions – if a specific media instance
strongly has all these properties, then it has very high narrativeness (a
“classical” story)
Subsets of the dimensions can be considered for specific purposes
Spatial Dimension
Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents
Temporal Dimension
The world must be situated in time and undergo significant
transformations
The transformations must be caused by non-habitual physical events
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Narrative dimensions (continued)
Mental Dimension
Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent
agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the
states of the world
Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these
agents, motivated by identifiable goals and plans
Formal and Pragmatic Dimensions
The sequence must form a unified causal chain and lead to
closure
The occurrence of at least some of these events must be
asserted as fact in the story world
The story must communicate something meaningful to the
recipient
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The cognitive skills of narrative interpretation
Understanding a narrative involves the exercise of
multiple cognitive skills
Focusing thought on specific objects cut out from the flux
of perception
Inferring causal relationships between states and events
Situating events in time
Reconstructing content of other people’s minds based on
their behavior
But the exercise of these cognitive skills alone does
not make something a narrative – only when all of
these skills come together to construct a stable
mentall image do we have narrative
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Narrative modes
In order to develop a media-free narratology, we need to
understand the various mechanisms by which narrative scripts
can be evoked
A narrative script is the mental image of the narrative
The standard way of evoking narrative scripts is for someone to tell
someone else that something happened (narrating a story)
A narrative mode is a distinct way to bring to mind the
cognitive construct that defines narrativity
Ryan defines a number of dimensions that characterize
different narrative modes
These dimensions are not completely independent
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Narrative modes (continued)
External/Internal
In external mode, narratives are encoded in material signs
Internal mode does not involve textualization
Fictional/Nonfictional
Whether the narrative involves this world or a possible world
Representational/Simulative
Representational mode encodes a fixed sequence (isolates a fixed
possibility)
Simulative mode is productive of multiple possibilities
Diegetic/mimetic
In diegetic mode, the narrative is communicated through telling
In mimetic mode, the narrative is communicated through showing
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Narrative modes (continued)
Autotelic/Utilitarian
In autotelic mode, a story is told for its own sake
In utilitarian mode, a story is subordinated to another goal
Autonomous/Illustrative
In autonomous mode, the story is new to the receiver
In illustrative mode, the story retells and completes a story, depending on the
receiver’s previous knowledge
Scripted/Emergent
In scripted mode, story and discourse are fixed
In emergent mode, discourse and some aspects of story are created live
Receptive/Participatory
In receptive mode, the recipient plays no role in discourse or story
In participatory mode (subcategory of emergent), the active participation of
the recipient actualizes and completes the story on the level of discourse
and/or story
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Narrative modes (continued)
Determinate/indeterminate
In determinate mode, the text specifies enough points along the story
arc to form a definite script
In indeterminate mode, only a few points are given – the recipient fills
in the rest
Retrospective/simultaneous/prospective
The recounting of past, current, or future events
Literal/metaphorical
In literal mode, the narrative satisfies most or all of the 8 definitional
dimensions
In metaphorical mode, there are violations of a number of the
dimensions
The goal of this distinction is to recognize the expanded notions of the
term “narrative” without sacrificing the precision of the core construct
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What are media?
Two contrasting views: the pipe vs. language
The pipe view enables transmedial analysis but ignores the affordances of
different media
E.g. TV – a transmissive medium, but has its own affordances
The language view admits the affordances of different media, but risks radical
media relativism
The language notion of media is primary – there’s nothing to transmit
through a pipe unless it has first been encoded in language
There may be no pure pipes – things that look like pipes mall all have
language-like affordances
Since the language view is primary, Ryan wants to find a middle ground that
recognizes the material support of semiotic languages, will avoiding both
the media relativist and pipe views
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Three ways to analyze media
Media as semiotic phenomena – broad categories of sign
systems
Language
Images
Music
Media as technologies
Allows us to drill in on specific material supports – fractures broad
categories of sign systems into specific subtypes
E.g. Ong’s analysis of the shift from oral culture, to writing, to printing
Media as cultural practice (communities of practice)
Lack a distinct semiotic and technological identity (e.g. newspapers vs.
books)
Evolution of media forms depends on cultural pressures
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Narrative differences across media
Narrative differences across media play out in three different narrative
domains
Semantics (plot or story)
Syntax (discourse)
Pragmatics (uses of narrative)
Plot or story
Film prefers dramatic narratives structured by Aristotelian arc – TV prefers
episodic narratives with multiple plot lines – computer games prefer quest
narratives with a single plot line divided into multiple autonomous episodes
Discourse
Comics represent time via space usng distinct frames, film presents a
continuously moving image with edits
Uses of narrative
Blogging (posting of private diaries), tabletop RPGs (group improvisational
stories)
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Genre vs. medium
A medium is defined by a semiotic language and a technological support
that provide specific expressive affordances
A genre is a set of explicit rules for using a medium in a specific way
The distinction can be fuzzy
A medium is defined by cultural forces, but so is a genre (genre can reside in
communities of practice)
Different media employ different semiotic languages, but genre conventions
can be understood as semiotic sub-languages
Examples
The print novel is a medium – horror stories and detective stories are genres
Film is a medium – the light romantic comedy and the road movie are genres
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