Ludology

We were asked to read an article on narrative in games by Jesper Juul. This article (dispite being out of date by almost 10 years) argued for an against the idea of narrative in gameplay, weighing up pros and cons of this, and concluded that narrative and story should NEVER be told through gameplay (this is my understanding of the article and his standpoint).

I do believe however that his stance is not as extreme as it first appears. Being a Ludologist, he believes that games should be all about the games and not of the story, but I didn't notice in the article if he ever said the games should not contain story. As I understand his article, he argues that story should not be told through gameplay, which to a point, I agree with, and this is why many games use cutscenes to tell story. Some people may view cutscenes as lazy, but mechanically, they are more applicable to telling story than gameplay is more of the time.

This is argued by Juul through the notion of translatability of a story. He says if you take a game, any game, and made it into a film, a film which was 100% accurate to the game, then the player would likely turn off the film from boredom very early. This is because a lot of mechanics of games are not narrative mechanics, an example being random encounters in Final Fantasy games, these being used to make the game more interesting when traveling and farming levels, this does not translate to any other media. However, If you took a cutscene heavy game, and removed 90% of the gameplay, then translated it into a film, most of the film would already be there in cutscene form and would translate fairly accurately. In this scenario, the film would only be as good as the writing for the game.

Personally, I believe it doesn't hurt to have the occasional story heavy gameplay section, but that's all it would be, a section. I see story in games as being secondary, important, but secondary. You have to invest yourself in the game to care for the story in most cases. At the same time, a good game will have you invest yourself into the gameplay aswell, and trying to do both would at the same time would be a detriment to both story and gameplay.


Games Telling Stories? - A brief not on games and narratives, 2001. Gamestudies.org [online] Available at: <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/> [Accessed 10 October 2013 ].