Dear Player: Maybe media are better with fewer stories?
The world is a murky, ineffable place - maybe it needs reconfigured in "ghastly new ways" (Bogost, 2017), or maybe we need to change the way we think.
Maybe we keep having this conversation about 'stories in games' because it's not just about games, but about how we see the world? This is my take (/wish/prayer?) on the recent reignition of the ludo-narrative-debate-that-never-was: Bogost's article in The Atlantic and Walker and Klepek's responses on Waypoint. My hot take is a personal one, motivated by two frustrations: 1) we keep getting stuck in this debate without learning from it or really questioning its origins, 2) as a historian I have an innate skepticism of stories' ability to critically describe the world, and feel that a lot of interpersonal and political problems stem from the ways we try to fit our lives into stories. I also take a little umbridge (as a visual culture type person) at how this debate makes it look like our discipline's focus is only on mechanics and stories rather than aesthetics, ludomusicology, philosophy, interface etc. etc. etc.
To recap (from my perspective), Bogost argues that stories in games are "a fine goal... but not an ambitious one" and that games have more critical and artistic potential as conceptual and structural means of reconfiguring the world and our relationship to it non-narratively. Walker and Klepek argue that we do and should have space for stories, that stories are a powerful art form, and a popular means of expression/critique, and given this widespread tendency to use stories as a popular vehicle of meaning we should face facts and support them. I have great respect for all these authors, and outwardly (in my reading), there isn't much contention between them here. Indeed, the authors seem to be aware of this - the difference is in how they apportion value. The two sides give different weight to different tools in the developer's toolkit, and also to the different aims they imagine the medium having. Bogost thinks stories are good but not great, walker thinks they can be great, and they're everywhere already so we might as well. The first is a bit more radical and a bit more elitist (let's start again, and be better!) and the latter is a bit more reformist and a bit more populist (let's stick with what we've got and make it better!).
But stories don't exist. They're everywhere in popular media, but they aren't present in our lives. If you hope you're love-life is going to work out like a rom-com, I've got sad news for you, and if you think America's history is a story of progress, I'm afraid there are some cruel suprises in store for you. Journalists and newspapers try to wrap the world in stories, and when something doesn't fit, they ignore it. When we start learning politics, history and science we're given stories and campaigns, about kings, and about apples falling out of trees, but to get a deeper understanding of the world we need to get past these abstractions. If nothing else, we need to at least find deeper, more nuanced abstractions - models, systems, concepts, forms, structures. Stories can be expressive and persuasive, but they're also deeply anthropocentric means of describing and relating to the world - they embody concepts and sequence time in ways which are both illustrative and deceptive. And they've been done. A lot. Can't games also do more? There's nothing wrong with stories as entertainment, and they are also one of many great means of expression, but they have limitations when it comes to their capacity to inform people - they're very effective but only up to a point (and that's before we get into popular exchange rates between 'pictures' and 'words'). Arguments, analysis, systems and phenomena each have expressive horizons as broad as 'narrative', and arguably more critical capacity. After all, academics and scientists don't use stories, they use models and debates.
What about a position that wasn't elitist and wasn't reformist? One that didn't estrange it's audience, but also didn't capitulate to it? Yes, stories are everywhere, but can't we aspire to change popular values? People like soundbites, the culture industry produces millions of them, but does that mean we have to embrace the form in order to engage or persuade a broad audience? 'Family values' are popular, they get used and framed in different ways across the political spectrum, but shouldn't we try and get people to care about more folk than just those who are close to them. A lot of people are going to vote republican and a lot of people are going to vote for centre-right candidates, but does that mean we should aspire to better political parties, or a better system, period?
Bogost points out that stories are one tool shared by a handful of media. Bogost is crazy formalist in going about this, but Walker's accusation of ignorance and elitism can run both ways - we can get blinded by Hollywood and Netflix, and ignore things as diverse and popular as Instagram, candy-crush and 3d-printing. Stories aren't the only popular vehicle for meaning out there. Why do we think stories are necessarily at the cutting-edge of our medium, when they haven't been the cutting-edge other media for generations? Dancers, painters, architects, composers, sculptors and photographers - they don't need stories. It's important to defend the right of story-telling in games, because within games this is contested, but outside of games stories are a hegemonic form that should be critiqued and resisted. Indeed, stories are being critiqued outside of games by high-culture and low-culture alike, why can't are medium aspire to this?
To paraphrase Bogost, I think stories are a 'fine goal', but I think there are more 'ambitious goals' too. But I don't think games should just reflect on their own medium specifics, or value mechanics above all else, I just think we should have more emphasis on games about sensations, about imagery, about pattern, about calculation, about ideas and structures and interfaces and sounds and theories above and beyond narratives.
This argument of mine may be a rant, but we can agree it isn't a story. We may all be sick of this debate in particular, but maybe it hasn't gone away because in a world drowning in stories we're in need of some good arguments.
Merlin Seller