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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