Narrative in the space of videogames and its integration to the architectural renderings

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Copyright 2018 [Elisabeth Koliniati] 3

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ABSTRACT

Every game is a set of rules that invites the player to interact with them. Through this interaction various outcomes can emerge forming a Possibility Space through which the player can understand and evaluate the game’s meaning. The field of architecture has the ability to function as a crucial tool for the design of the conditions that will activate these meanings, an ability that still has a lot of strands to explore. What these meanings will be and how they will be able to get organized and communicate with the player making good use of the gamespace for delivering the overall experience, is the main objective of this thesis. The quality of the interaction between the player and the space will be the main axis of research, in order to achieve a wider, more organized and conscious ‘’vocabulary’’. For the purposes of this research I will try to expand this ‘’vocabulary’’ by integrating the field of Game Theory with the field of architecture and videogames. The tools of Game Theory that aim to model human behavior, are transformed into new tools for the synthesis of space and narrative, in order to analyze the behavior of the player in space. Thus, the creation and depiction of the conditions and the conflicts inside a game, are re-defined with new criterions that set the foundations for further experimentation.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family and my friends (Laura, Thomas, Erianna, Iris) for the support and the understanding they showed, as well as my supervisor Konstantinos Ougrinnis, who inspired me to try the analysis of this particular subject. I would also like to thank the people that through their work opened new horizons for me, and guided me to discover my own ‘’truths’’: Herbert Gintis, Ian Bogost, Katie Salen, Erik Zimmerman, Jason Vandenberghe.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................... 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................................ 9 INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 13 METHODOLOGY AND OVERVIEW ..................................................................................................... 15 1.

PLAY-SPACE AND GAME-SPACE ......................................................................................... 17 About the concept of play ...................................................................................................... 19 About the concept of games ................................................................................................ 20 Questions of research ............................................................................................................. 20

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INTRODUCING EVENTS INTO SPATIAL DESIGN ............................................................ 23 2.1 Themes from the Manhattan Transcripts ................................................................... 25 2.2 Introducing new devices in architecture .................................................................... 27 2.3 New modes of notation .................................................................................................. 28 1.

Movement notation ................................................................................... 29

2.

Event notation .............................................................................................. 31

2.4 Articulation .......................................................................................................................... 32 Sequence ...................................................................................................................... 32 2.5 Combination........................................................................................................................ 33 Program ........................................................................................................................ 33 3.

ARCHITECTURE AND NARRATIVE ...................................................................................... 36 3.1 Storytelling with modular assets ................................................................................... 39 3.1.1

Spaces, events and narrative .................................................................. 39

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3.2

3.1.2

A framework for narrative........................................................................ 40

3.1.3

Intentions of research ............................................................................... 40

3.1.4

Elements of narrative game design ....................................................... 41

Environmental Storytelling ..................................................................................... 42 3.2.1

Evocative narrative ..................................................................................... 42

3.2.2

Staging spaces/Enacting stories ............................................................ 43

3.2.3

Embedded narrative .................................................................................. 44

3.2.4

Emerging narrative .................................................................................... 45

4. INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE ................................................................................................................ 46 4.1

Space of possibility.................................................................................................... 49 4.1.1 Creating procedural literacy ......................................................................... 50 4.1.2 Design examples .............................................................................................. 50

4.2

Possible structures of interactive narrative ....................................................... 52

4.3

Molecule level spaces............................................................................................... 54

4.4

4.3.1

The Basics of Molecule Design............................................................... 54

4.3.2

Form follows gameplay with proximity diagrams ........................... 56

Game narrative spaces............................................................................................. 57

5. SPACE AND DISCOURSE .................................................................................................................. 59 5.1

Space vs program....................................................................................................... 61

5.2

Architecture and language ...................................................................................... 61

5.3 The language of narrative .............................................................................................. 62 5.3.1 Semiotics of language .................................................................................... 62 5.3.2 Semiotics of narrative .................................................................................... 62 5.4 Level of discourse .............................................................................................................. 64 10

5.4.1 Constructing oratory ...................................................................................... 64 5.4.2 Visual rhetoric .................................................................................................. 66 5.4.3 Digital rhetoric ................................................................................................. 66 5.4.4 Procedural rhetoric ......................................................................................... 67 5.4.5 Rhetorical structures of procedural arguments .................................... 68 5.4.6 Towards a more sophisticated interactivity ............................................ 69 5.5 Levels of narrative model................................................................................................ 69 1.

The determination of units ...................................................................... 70

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Classes of units ............................................................................................. 71

5.6 The system of narrative ................................................................................................... 73 5.7 Towards a new architectural language....................................................................... 76 6.

IMPLEMENTING GAME THEORY INTO GAME DESIGN ............................................... 89

IMPLEMENTING GAME THEORY INTO GAME DESIGN .............................................................. 89 6.1 Problem statement ............................................................................................................. 91 6.2 Understanding how game theory works – putting social conflict into play ... 91 6.3 Game Theory Tools ........................................................................................................... 92

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1.

Characteristics of players ......................................................................... 92

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Informational structure ............................................................................. 93

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Payoffs and rewards .................................................................................. 94

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Game rules – Game Theory models ..................................................... 97

CONCLUSIONS.......................................................................................................................... 111

TERM INDEX ............................................................................................................................................. 113 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................................ 115

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INTRODUCTION Today, games are not merely for children – they constitute a major adult business, and major architecture is created through them. This research aims to contribute to an architectural understanding and appreciation of play and games.

In videogames, the absence of the limitations of the real world enable the designer to act in a completely different context than the architect. Consequently, a need occurs for establishing a true link between the design of games and the design of architecture, understanding both fields as procedures.

There are several reasons I privilege this medium over other procedural media: Videogames are an expressive medium. They represent how real and imaginative systems work. They invite players to interact with those systems, and form judgments about them. As part of this ongoing process of understanding this medium, and pushing it a step further each time, we must first strive to understand "how to construct and critique the representations of our world, in videogame form."1 Game developers can learn to create games that make deliberate expressions about the world. Players can learn to read and critique these models, deliberating the implications of such claims.

When videogames are analyzed with this logic, they can lay the foundation for a variety of subjects to analyze.

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Bogost, Ian: Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, The MIT Press, (2007)

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METHODOLOGY AND OVERVIEW This treatise on the nature of a game theoretic architecture is structured as follows: 1.

In the first section, “PLAY-SPACE AND GAME-SPACE”, we examine the conceptual space of play and its differences from that of games, seeking the dimensions that are relevant in looking at play and games as an architectural category. The goal is to sketch out a preliminary analysis framework for investigating the spatiality of games, connecting play and games with events that happen in a setting of space and time, and in which the playspace and gamespace dimensions are set into relation.

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In the following section, “INTRODUCING EVENTS INTO SPATIAL DESIGN” we refer to the work of Bernard Tschumi, a theoretical architect who binds spatial design with the events that happen in it, drawing correlations to the contemporary needs of level design.

What is studied, are the connections between space, movement, and events, which constitute sequences and programs that require analogous notation. Drawing themes from his work “Architecture and Disjunction”, we focus on his attempt to bring a new architectural discourse, thus preparing the ground for further exploration in the architectural game design.

Understanding the importance of narrative as the connecting factor between space and events, that functions both as a setting and as a consequence, we proceed to the section of “ARCHITECTURE AND NARRATIVE”. In this section, we will try to framework its core

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mechanics and the importance of environmental storytelling for the formulation of crafted interactive stories and the emergence of improvised play experiences, aiming at expanding the concepts of the fore mentioned architectural discourse.

Focusing on the interactive aspect of narrative and the importance it has for a meaningful play experience, we analyze the “space of possibilities” it creates in a separate chapter. In the “INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE” we aim at developing a tool pallet for the future

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designer to implement, in order to create meaningful emerging experiences. From efficiently communicating the game mechanics to players through space design, to categorizing its possible structures and notation diagrams, the goal is to treat architecture as a language that can organize its elements to mount arguments about the game world, and aid the persuasive power of videogames.

Having discussed the ways in which interactivity can be designed and enabled, in the following chapter “SPACE AND DISCOURSE” we aim to explore the deeper implications these interactions can have to an individual experiencing play. Acknowledging the players actions as inputs that wait a response provided by the game system, we look at the player’s interaction as a form of “conversation”, where the quality is completely dependent on the “possibility space” offered by design. Drawing analogies to similar researches in the semiotics of language and narrative, we will discuss the concept of constructing rhetorics through design that can create procedural arguments and lead towards a more sophisticated interactivity. The way to achieve that, is by looking at how language constructs oratory by persuasively combining its elements and try to draw the equivalent correlations with the elements that constitute a narrative and consequently a space.

Looking at how narrative is structured as a language, we distinguish its functional units and figure out its functional syntax addressing the work of Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”. While also searching how meaning emerges and how messages are constructed, we sketch a framework of the system of narrative that encompasses multiple readings that therefore relates to how poetry functions, according to the work of Jacobson. As a result these become new factors introduced to the architectural discourse, where the relationships between representation,

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metaphor and the real world need to be constantly questioned in order to provide meaningful experiences. Addressing the problem of the limited selections that are constantly simulated we return to the basic core concept of what games are about, which are primarily based on providing systems of conflict. Concluding the chapter, it is precisely this framing of conflict that serves this research purpose, since any argument and meaning can only be formed by contradicting different elements together. The eventual question that arises and finally forms the key concept of this discourse, is what elements will be chosen to be put into conflict and on what context. For this particular research, my answer lies in studying the player’s individuality and the ways he experiences play that is a product of the fundamental contradiction behind any form of play: the contradiction of the double-consciousness of play. This double consciousness is what makes any player play under three identities: the identity of a character, which is the projection of himself/herself on an avatar, the identity of the player that wants to win a game, and the identity of a person who is part of a larger social setting.

Providing a solid ground for the realization of the previews studies on exploring spatial design as a language and discourse, in “IMPLEMENTING GAME THEORY INTO GAME DESIGN” we will set the player as the primary “functional unit” of gameplay and try to distinguish the “functional syntax” that governs the player’s behavior through the use of space. Providing the models and tools for game theory to integrate with spatial design we redefine gameplay and architectural procedures as a playground of multiple sciences to take place. In this way, we provide the design of new elements of conflict, such as cultural and social conflict that can have a more meaningful impact to the player while offering new simulation potentials in game design.

The results in which we end up in the last chapter ‘’OUTCOMES’’, are a product of our analysis of the integration between game theory, architecture and videogames. With this analysis, the ability to expand the kind of representations and conflicts games are used to show is better understood, together with the influences games can bring to real life. In addition, architecture can function as a language that can produce its own meanings that are communicated through the game space, contributing to the above research outcomes.

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1. PLAY-SPACE AND GAME-SPACE

01 PLAYSPACE AND GAMESPACE

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“To choose a game is to choose an architecture” Mark Wigley2 We look at games and play as human practices in space, and in doing so, initially examine play in the context of architecture.

About the concept of play In the past, the phenomenon of play has been investigated by many scholars from a wide variety of fields. In Homo Ludens3, cultural anthropologist Johan Huizinga argues that play as activity is as important as that of reasoning and structuring. For Huizinga, the act of playing has preceded human culture, and was also inherent to animals way before the existence of humans.

The common ways that both humans and animals experience play on the early stages of life, show that it something more than a simple instinct. It encompasses a signifying function, it has certain meanings. It is a function with an utmost importance for the real life, though its precise nature and meaning has not yet been clarified. Huizinga also claims that human culture itself bears the character of play, suggesting that play is not only of prime importance but also a necessary condition for enculturalization.

The concept of play has also been employed to the field of architecture. With regard to the design of the built environment, Le Corbusier’s oft-cited work from Vers une Architecture states that “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light, establishing stirring relationships”4. Reflecting on the information age, William J. Mitchell plays on Le Corbusier’s belief in progress, stating: “Architecture is no longer simply the play of masses in light. It now embraces the play of digital information in space”.5 Tying the activity of play to a playing-field, gives play a context of space and time. If one accepts the condition that “Architecture is the art of moving through space” (Naos 2000), one could even argue that such a kineticist space sculpts a kind of architectural play-frame; thus creating a fundamental conceptual dimension of playspace. As a consequence we can define play as having four dimensions:  Whether physical or virtual, play is grounded in and executed through movement: The nature of play is kinetic.  Kinesis bridges a player with one or more players, play-objects, and/or player environments (or combination thereof) that feature some kind of valence and, in their own ways, play back.  This dialectical to-and-fro creates and/or adjusts to a play rhythm, which relates to alternations between tension and termination: From both, a play dynamic emerges.  Play takes place on a play-ground and simultaneously defines that play-ground (i.e. by defining its boundaries in space and time).

When we play, we tend to measure the geometry of play-space. How big is the playing field? And where are its borders? These lengths and widths become, in turn, the source of the game’s internalization of both geometrical space and discrete progression.

Play can also focus on investigations of semantics. When we play, we evaluate space, but we also discover ways to interpret or perhaps reinterpret the visible as well as hidden narratives of

Space time play : computer games, architecture and urbanism : the next level / edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Bottger ; in collaboration with Drew Davidson, Heather Kelley, Julian Kèucklich, Basel ; Boston : Birkhauser, c2007.

3 Huizinga, J. (1970). Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture. London, Maurice Temple Smith Ltd. 4 Le Corbusier: Toward an Architecture (1924), Frances Lincoln, 2008 p.102 and p.194 5 William J. Mitchell : E-topia: “Urban Life, Jim—But Not As We Know It" (1999), MIT Press; New Ed edition 2

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play. Not only do we explore a world while playing in it; the meaning we can potentially uncover and the stories we can invent also drive us.

About the concept of games Games and play are interrelated phenomena. Salen and Zimmerman argue that games are a subset of play in that they formalize play, on the one hand, and on the other hand, that play is an essential game component6. Without one or more players, there is no play; and without playing, the formal system of a game is not set in motion, but sits idling. This reciprocity is complemented by the concept of “meaningful play” which will be further analyzed in the following chapters: in games, players can participate with “designed choices and procedures”, and these programmed choices are made explicit to the player, like following the rules of a board game or using a game controller to move an avatar. Player choices result in game system outcomes, and the relationships between actions and outcomes are specified by rules. As a result of the above action, outcome units, interactive meaning, and, in turn, meaningful play arise.

Other research further complicates the peculiar relationship between play and games.

Game theorist Jesper Juul, for example, holds that games contextualize play actions, and that in games, rules facilitate actions by differentiating between potential moves and game occurrences.7 Raph Koster, lead designer of the massive multiplayer role playing game Ultima Online, suggests that playing a game implies pattern recognition, and that playing a certain kind of game involves recognizing and learning to master a particular kind of pattern 8.

Differences between play-space and game-space 



Mapping a place through adventurous discovery in order to figure out the stories underneath the space and possibly invent new ones in the same process is all about playing.

Learning to move and advance in a space filled with discrete norms of orientation – meaning that you can do “this” but not “that” – is the art of gaming.

Play is about presence while game is about progression.

Play-space could be a city, and game-space could be the rules and informational network dictating what can and cannot be done during gameplay. In the present research, we will decode both play and games, in the sections of “games as systems” and “games as representations”.

Questions of research The questions that can help guide us in framing such a ludic architecture include:  What are the parameters of a conceptual space of play, and how can we consider play as an architectural category? How is play architected? How does it relate to space, and how does it produce space?  What are the parameters of a conceptual space of digital games – what can we gain from locative, representational, programmatic, dramaturgical, typological, perspectivistic, form-functional, technological, and phenomenological approaches?  What does a sketched analytical framework for games-as-architectures sui generis look like?

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Katie Salen and Erik Zimmerman: “Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals” (2003), MIT Press Jesper Juul. “Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds” (2005), MIT Press 8 Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design(2005), Paraglyph Press 7

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In this section, we outline the dimensions of conceptual playspace in order to understand what the parameters of play are, and how the space of play can be designed and relate to games.

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2. INTRODUCING EVENTS INTO SPATIAL DESIGN

02 INTRODUCING EVENTS INTO SPATIAL DESIGN

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Architecture has always been as much about the event that takes place in a space, as about the space itself. Function does not follow form, form does not follow function – or fictionhowever they certainly interact.

Buildings may be about usefulness, architecture not necessarily so. Architecture’s nature is not always found within building, especially referencing to virtual worlds. Events, drawings, texts expand the boundaries of socially justifiable constructions.

Figure 1 Figure 2 Piranesi’s engravings of prisons (Figure 1), Boullee’s washes of monuments (Figure 2) have drastically influenced architectural thought and its related practice.

If architecture is both concept and experience, space and use, structure and superficial image – nonhierarchically – then architecture should cease to separate these categories and instead merge them into unprecedented combinations of programs and spaces.

The radical theoretical architect Bernard Tschumi, renowned architect of deconstructivism, has particularly sited the notions of concept and experience in his work, designing space as the result of events and movement. Drawing parallels to the importance of these events and movements in the virtual space, we will proceed to analyze the design tools of Tschumi’s work in order to apply these in game design.

2.1 Themes from the Manhattan Transcripts By arguing that there is no architecture without event, without program, without violence, the Transcripts9 attempt to bring architecture to its limits, as they inset particular programmatic and formal concerns within both the architectural discourse and its representation.

Limit: a boundary (architecture: a form of knowledge whose limits are constantly questioned) The Transcripts take as their starting point today’s inevitable disjunction between use, form, and social values. They argue that when this condition becomes an architectural confrontation, a new relation of pleasure and violence occurs.

Disjunction: the act of disjoining or condition of being disjoined; separation, disunion.

As in literature and psychoanalysis, in architecture the signifier does not represent the signified. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between an architectural sign and its impossible interpretation. Between signifier and signified stands a barrier: the barrier of actual use.

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Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, Academy Editions, 1994

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The Manhattan Transcripts and then the Folies aimed at developing a related theory that would take into account both the unexpected and the aleatory, the pragmatic and the passionate, and would turn into reason what was formerly excluded from the realm of architecture because it seemed to belong to the realm of the irrational. Using space in unexpected ways is also one of the key components of videogames, since gameplay events and actions are unlikely to happen in reality.

The Manhattan Transcripts aim at an architectural representation of reality. They use a particular structure indicated by photographs that either direct or “witness” events (or ‘functions’/ ‘programs’).

Figure 3 Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts, MT 4. The shapes and angles of his photograph are abstracted into sudden lines, half circles, rectangles and grids.

At the same time plans, sections and diagrams outline spaces and indicate the movements of the different protagonists – those people intruding in the architectural ‘stage set’. The same design principles and tools could be applied in level design, since the player enters a ‘staged’ environment which he can interact with in multiple ways.

Figure 4 Example of architectural sketches, that include the depiction of movement, use and events.

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Figure 5 Manifold Garden, by William Chyr (2018), invites the player to rediscover gravity and explore an Escher-esque world of impossible architecture.

Figure 6 Echochrome II, Japan Studio (2010), introduces a unique twist on gameplay that lets players use pure imagination to solve puzzles by controlling light and shadows.

2.2 Introducing new devices in architecture The Transcripts function as a device. Their explicit purpose is to transcribe things normally removed from conventional architectural representation, namely the complex relationship between spaces and their use; between the set and the script; between ‘type’ and ‘program’; between objects and events.’

The elements of architectural experience The Transcripts offer a different reading of architecture in which space, movement and events are ultimately independent, yet stand in a new relation to one another, so that the conventional components of architecture are broken down and rebuilt among different axes.

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Event: an incidence, an occurrence; a particular item in a program. Events can encompass particular uses, singular functions or isolated activities.

Architecture was seen as the combination of spaces, events, and movements without any hierarchy or precedence among these concepts. It finds itself in a unique situation: it is the only discipline that by definition combines concept and experience, image and use, image and structure. Architects are the only ones who are prisoners of that hybrid art, where the image can hardly exist without a combined activity.

Events have an independent existence of their own. Rarely are they purely the consequence of their surroundings. Events have their own logic, their own momentum. In literature, they belong to the category of the narrative.

Michel Foucault, expanded the use of the term event in a manner that went beyond the single action or activity and spoke of “events of thought”10. For Foucault, an event is not simply a logical sequence of words or actions but rather the moment of “erosion, collapse, questioning, or problematization on the very assumptions of the setting within which a drama may take place – occasioning the chance or possibility of another, different setting.” The event here is seen as turning point – not an origin or an end- as opposed to such propositions as form follows function.

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Michel Foucault, (1996) [1968]. “History, discourse and discontinuity” S. Lotringer, ed., Foucault live (interviews, 1961-1984) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996)

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Derrida elaborated on this concept, proposing the possibility of an “architecture of the event”11 that would “eventualize” or open up that which, in our history or tradition, is understood to be fixed, essential, monumental.

So the event is the place where the rethinking and reformulation of the different elements of architecture, many of which have resulted in or added to contemporary social inequities, may lead to their solution. By definition, it is the place of the combination of differences.

For Tschumi the future of architecture lies in the construction of such event, just as the construction of space that goes with the event.

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Space: a cosa-mentale? Kant’s a-priori category of consciousness? A pure form? Or rather, a social product, the projection on the ground of a socio-political structure?

In the age of modernity architectural spaces can have an autonomy and a logic of their own.

Distortions, ruptures, compressions, fragmentations and juxtapositions are inherent in the manipulation of form, from Piranesi to Schwitters, from Dr Caligari to Rietveld.

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Movement: the action or process of moving. Also a particular act of moving. (In a poem or narrative: progress of incidents, development of a plot; the quality of having plenty of incidents.)

Movement suggests the inevitable intrusion of bodies into the controlled order of architecture. Entering a building becomes an act that violates the balance of a precisely ordered geometry, where bodies carve unexpected spaces through their fluid or erratic motions. Bodies not only move in but generate spaces produced by and through their movements. Movements – of dance, sport, war – are the intrusion of events into architectural spaces.

These events become scenarios or programs, void of moral or functional implications, independent but inseparable from the spaces that enclose them.

The reality of the sequences does not lie in the accurate representation of the outside world, but in the internal logic these sequences display. Those fragments of reality unavoidably introduce ideological and cultural concerns.

Three disjoined levels of ‘reality’ are presented simultaneously in the Transcripts: 1. the world of objects, composed of buildings abstracted from maps, plans, photographs; 2. the world of movement, which can be abstracted from choreography, sports or other movement diagrams; 3. the world of events, which is abstracted from news photographs.

2.3 New modes of notation The purpose of the tripartide mode of notation (events, movements, spaces) is to introduce the order of experience, the order of time – moments, intervals, sequences – for all inevitably intervene in the reading of the city=game level.

It also proceeds from a need to question the modes of representation generally used by architects: plans, sections, axonometrics, perspectives. However precise and generative they have been, each implies a logical reduction of architectural thought to what can be shown, at the exclusion of other concerns. They are caught in a sort of prison – house of architectural language, where ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’.

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Derrida, Jacques, 1986, Point de Folie—Maintenant l’architecture, in TSCHUMI, Bernard, 1986 : La case Vide: La Villette 1985, LONDRES, Architectural Association.

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Any attempt to go beyond such limits, to offer another reading of architecture demands the questioning of these conventions.

Notation: the process or method of representing numbers, quantities etc. by a system of signs, hence, any set of symbols or characters used to do this.

Issues of notation became fundamental: if the reading of architecture was to include the events that took place in it, it would be necessary to devise modes of notating such activities.

Several modes of notation were invented to supplement the limitations of plans, sections or axonometrics. Movement notation derived from choreography, and simultaneously scores derived from music notation were elaborated for architectural purposes.

Figure 7 Film sequence diagram by Sergei Eisenstein

1. Movement notation Using movement notation as a means of recalling issues is an attempt to include new and stereotypical codes in architectural drawing and, by extension, in its perception, layerings, juxtaposition and superimposition of images that purposefully blur the conventional relationship between plan, graphic conventions and their meaning in the built realm.

The movement - of crowds, dancers, fighters – recall the inevitable intrusion of bodies into architectural spaces, the intrusion of one order to another. The need to accurately record such confrontations, without falling into functionalist formulas suggested precise forms of movement notation. An extension of the drawn conventions or choreography, this notation attempts to eliminate the preconceived meaning given to particular actions in order to concentrate on their spatial effects: the movement of bodies in space.

If the spatial sequences inevitably implies the movement of an observer, then such movement can be objectively mapped and formalized-sequentially.

S Space

E Event

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M Movement

Perhaps the most representative and movement-focused research approach is that of Kinetography Laban or Labanotation, a movement notation system similar to music notation that “indicate[s] the accurate rhythm of movement”12. It is particularly intended for the field of dance and generally aims to analyze and “record objectively the changes in the angles of the limbs, the paths in space, and the flow of energy [as well as] movement motivation and the subtle expression and quality”.

Figure 8 Laban notation, floor plan generator, 2008

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One way to notate movement using Labanotation is the Structural Form, which records: the body and its parts, space (i.e. direction, level, distance, and degree of motion), time (i.e. meter and duration) and dynamics (i.e. quality or texture – like, for example, strong, heavy, elastic, accented, or emphasized).

Laban’s system assumes that the purpose of any action may be to relate to one’s own body, another person, an object, or a space (or part of space). The notion of rhythm, eventually, is linked to translating a basic recurrent beat or rhythmic pattern in music into physical action.

What does this mean in the context of play?

Because computing technologies allow for the framing and constructing of motion, in real-time digital games, not only does the player prescribe the movements of the player-avatar, but at the same time, the software program triggers player movements, detecting collision and scrutinizing whether or not the notational instructions are carried out in an orderly fashion.

Reflecting on Labanotation, Pias argues that in this context, we can think of gameplay as a kind of dance.13 Based on Pias, but also on Laban, we can propose a more general and more dialectical way to look at play through the lens of dance. First, a stimulus – which can be a solo event, a beat, or a rhythmic pattern – provides the player with something to respond to or with which to synchronize; in response to this stimulus, the player enacts a movement. This movement (or rhythm) places the player in a novel relation to another player, an object, or a space, possibly triggering a response.

Recently, Laban’s system has inspired other notational attempts. For example, in her German language doctoral dissertation, Gesche Joost (2006:65ff.) presents a visual notation system as an alternative analysis and information visualization method for a rhetorically oriented film analysis, intended to serve both as a tool and a language that transcends the composition of an opus.

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Hutchinson, Ann, Labanotation: Or, Kinetography Laban : the System of Analyzing and Recording Movement, (1977) Taylor & Francis 13 Pias, Claus, Computer Spiel Welten, Munchen, Germany, Sequenzia Verlag, 2002

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Figure 9 Analysis of Staroye i novoye του Sergej Eisenstein based on Gesche Joost notations.

A notational system similar to that of Laban or Joost that would allow for the recording and even designing of play or gameplay has not yet been fully conceived, but will be an mportant topic in future game design research.

Figures 10-11 Examples of Sony PlayStation Move controller

Analyzing the relationship between bodily actions and the corresponding responses from technology in two Sony Eyetoy games for the Sony PlayStation 2, Loke et al. 14 have applied, among other movement-interaction frameworks, the Structural Form in Labanotation according to Hutchinson and other specialists in the field.

Their contribution draws on the increasingly phenomenological philosophy in interaction design that all human actions, including cognitive acts, represent embodied action and that the bodily experience of movement is a way to access the world and objects in the world.

In particular with regard to pervasive games that increasingly involve physical body movements, Loke et al. demonstrate how to use Labanotation as an analysis tool and potential game design tool. Given our human ability to move and to both react to and create rhythm, the discussion of play as movement will certainly resonate.

2. Event notation Each event or action (a singular moment of a ‘program’) can be denoted by a photograph, in an attempt to get closer to an objectivity (even if never achieved) often missing from architectural programs.

14

Locke, Lian et al. Labanotation for design of movement-based interaction, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney Australia, 2005

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Figure 12 The first episode – The ‘Park’ – is composed of 24 sheets illustrating the drawn and photographed notation of a murder. The formula plot of the murder is juxtaposed with an architecture inextricably linked to the extreme actions it witnesses.

Photographs direct the action, plans reveal the alternatively cruel and loving architectural manifestations, diagrams indicate the movement of the protagonists. There, attitudes, plans, notation, movement are indissolubly linked. Only together do they define the architectural space of the ‘Park’.

The insertion of movement or program into the overall architectural scheme implied breaking down some of the traditional components of architecture. It soon became clear that such decomposition permitted the independent manipulation of each new part according to narrative or formal considerations.

For example the plans and perspectives of the Park, the section of the Street, the axonometrics of the Tower all follow (and occasionally question) the internal logic of their modes of representation. The compositional implications of an axonometric are as a result, widely different from those of perspective with a single vanishing point.

2.4 Articulation The Manhattan transcripts are not a random accumulation of events; they display a particular organization. Their chief characteristic is the sequence, a composite succession of frames that confronts spaces, movements and events, each with its own combinative structure and inherent set of rules.

Sequence Any architectural sequence includes or implies at least three relations: 1. Αn internal relation, which deals with the method of work (transformational sequence); And two external relations: 2. one dealing with the juxtaposition of actual spaces (spatial sequence) 3. The other with program (occurrence of events) (programmatic sequence) 1.

Transformational sequence: a device/procedure

Transformational sequences tend to rely on the use of devices, or rules of transformation, such as compression, rotation, insertion and transference. They can also display particular sets of

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variations, multiplications, fusions, repetitions, inversions, substitutions, metamorphoses, anamorphoses, dissolutions. These devices can be applied to the transformation of spaces as well as programs.

2.

Sequences of space

Configurations en-suite, enfilades, spaces aligned along a common axis – all are specific architectural organizations, from Egyptian temples through the churches of the quattrocento to the present. All have emphasized a planned path with fixed halting points, a family of spatial points linked by continuous movement.

3.

Programmatic sequence: social and symbolic connotations

Architecture is inhabited: sequences of events, use, activities, incidents are always superimposed on those fixed spatial sequences. These are the programmatic sequences that suggest secret maps and impossible fictions, rambling collections of events all strung along a collection of spaces, frame after frame, room after room, episode after episode. 

Contracted sequences fragment individual spaces and actions into discrete segments.

They have occasionally reduced architecture’s three dimensions into one.



The expanded sequence makes a solid of the gap between spaces. The gap thus

becomes a space of its own, a corridor, a threshold, or doorstep – a proper symbol inserted between each event.

Combinations of expanded and contracted sequences can form spatial series, either coordinated or rhythmical.

All sequences are cumulative. They establish memory – of the preceding frame, of the course of events. To experience and to follow an architectural sequence is to reflect upon events in order to place them into successive wholes.

The final meaning of any sequences depend on the relation space/event/movement. By extension, the meaning of any architectural situation depends on the above relation. An implied narrative is always there, whether of method, use or form. It combines the presentation of an event (or chain of events), with its progressive spatial interpretation (which of course alters it).

The composite sequence SEM breaks the linearity of the elementary sequence, whether S, E or M. The linearity of sequences orders events, movements, spaces into a single progression that either combines or parallels divergent concerns. Not all architecture is linear, nor is it all made of spatial additions, of detachable parts and clearly defined entities. In the end meaning in structures is derived from the order of experience rather than the order of composition.

2.5 Combination Program By going beyond the conventional definition of ‘function’, the Transcripts use their combined levels of investigation to address the notation of the program – a field architectural ideologies have banished for decades – and explore unlikely confrontations.

Program: a combination of events.

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An architectural program is a list of required utilities; it indiciates their relations, but suggests neither their combination nor their proportion.

Issues of intertextuality, multiple readings and dual codings had to integrate the notion of program. A new formulation of the old trilogy appears. Distinctions can be made between mental, physical, and social space, or alternatively between language, matter and body. These distinctions lead to different modes of architectural notation.

A change is evident in architecture’s status:  in its relationship to its language,  its composing materials and  its individuals or societies.

The question is how these three terms are articulated and how they relate to each other within the field of contemporary practice.

Any given program can be analyzed, dismantled, deconstructed according to any rule or criteria, and then be reconstructed into another programmatic configuration. To discuss the idea of program today, by no means implies a return to notions of function versus form, to cause and effect relationships between program and type. On the contrary, it opens a field of research where spaces are finally confronted with what happens in them.

Adding events to the autonomous spatial sequence is a form of motivation, in the sense the Russian formalists gave to motivation ie. Whereby the ‘procedure’ and its devices are the very being of literature, and ‘content’ is a simple a posteriori justification of form.

Figure 13 Example of a storyboard The fascination with the dramatic, either in the program (murder, sexuality, violence) or in the mode of representation (strongly outlined images, distorted angles of vision – as if seen from a diving airforce bomber), is there to force a response.

An implied narrative is always there, whether of method, use or form. It combines the presentation of an event (or chain of events), with its progressive spatial interpretation (which of course alters it).

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3. ARCHITECTURE AND NARRATIVE

As a player, entering a scene, what do you think happened there?

What do you want to do next?

How does this scene make you feel?

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03 ARCHITECTURE AND NARRATIVE

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3.1 Storytelling with modular assets This scene may or may not have anything to do with the main plot of the game. Players who open the doorway the blood leads to may or may not find anything inside. What this scene does, however, is create a mini - narrative with environment art.

The story told by these objects contains no words, but helps establish tone, creates tension, and provides foreshadowing of things that the player may encounter later in the game.

Even if the player has seen similar assets elsewhere in the game, the arrangement is what makes the scene evocative. Assets embedded into a gamespace can develop unseen characters or provide narrative clues to game action. In games, art assets have the power to be evocative.

Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation.

A prehistory of video and computer games might take us through the evolution of paper mazes or board games, both preoccupied with the design of spaces, even where they also provided some narrative context.

In this chapter we explore:  how game mechanics and art create storytelling opportunities.  the different types of narrative spaces, as well as  how modular level assets can be utilized to create environmental narratives or even show narrative progression.

With these elements in mind, we examine narrative rewards to illustrate how narrative may be used to allow players opportunities for exploration, discovery, and writing their own narratives through gameplay.

3.1.1

Spaces, events and narrative

Our work argues that architecture cannot be dissociated from the events that “happen” in it. Recent projects insist constantly on issues of program and notation. They stress a critical attitude that observes, analyzes, and interprets some of the most controversial positions of past and present architectural ideologies.

The unfolding of events in a literary context inevitably suggested parallels to the unfolding of events in architecture.

As level designers, we should be concerned with finding the connections between narrative development, the embodiment of cultural ideas, and expressions of usable gamespace.

A common expression of these factors is worldbuilding, the creation of fictional worlds, geography, and cultures.

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3.1.2

A framework for narrative

J. Hillis Miller. In his essay "Narrative�15, Miller's model for understanding narrative contains the following elements: 1.

Situation: A narrative has: -

2.

an initial state, a change in that state, and insight brought about by that change.

This process constitutes the events of a narrative.

Character: A narrative is not merely a series of events, but a personification of events through a medium such as language. Miller doesn't mean character in the usual sense of fictional persona, but rather the process by which "character is created out of signs." This component references narratives as not just events that take place in the world, but as represented events, events that occur via systems of representation.

3.

Form: Representation is constituted by patterning and repetition. This is true on every

level of a narrative, whether it is the material form of the story or its conceptual themes.

Miller's definition is in some ways a formal approach to narrative. Events, characters, and patterned action describe the qualities of the narrative object, rather than the experience of that object.

3.1.3

Intentions of research

My intention is not just to arrive at a formal understanding of narrative (What are the elements of a story?) but instead an experiential one (How do the elements of a story engender a meaningful experience?).

My concern is with the experience of players: their internal state of mind, and the relationships they form with each other and with the dynamic system of a game. Everything we know so far about the experiential components of games— that they are complex sensual and psychological systems, that they create meaning through choice-making and metacommunication, that they sculpt and manipulate desire—are tools for crafting narrative experiences. These experiences emerge from the design of events, actions, and characters.

How do we design such a space?

How can we design game events as narrative events?

What kinds of personifications do game actions allow?

To understand how games construct narrative experiences we need to look at the dynamic structures of games, their emergent complexity, their participatory mechanisms, their experiential rhythms and patterns.

To understand game narratives, it is essential to analyze game structures and see how they ramify into different forms of narrative play.

15

Hillis Miller, "Narrative," In Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 77.

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3.1.4

Elements of narrative game design

1. Goals One fundamental building block of narrative game design is the goal of a game. Goals not only help players judge their progress through a game (how close are they to winning), but also guide players in understanding the significance of their actions within a narrative context.

2. Conflict Goals in a game are never easy to achieve. As players struggle toward the goal, conflict arises. Game conflict provides both opportunity for narrative events and a narrative context that frames the obstacles a player must overcome. Overcoming conflict in a game is one way narrative events advance.

Because conflict presumes a struggle between opposing forces, in a game there should always be some element that works against player success, an element that acts to try and ensure the failure of the player. This role is often taken by a villain character, a competing player or team, or may be embodied in the game system as a whole. From a narrative perspective, this element motivates and contextualizes player action.

Your action becomes meaningful within the narrative frame of the game. In traditional storytelling, the internal conflict of a character often shapes the kinds of experiences encountered by the audience. Internal conflict reveals a character's vulnerability, which is usually exploited by those who wish to see the character fail.

3. Uncertainty Uncertainty is another requisite quality of meaningful play. If a game is certain, if the outcome is known in advance, there is no reason to play in the first place. But uncertainty is also a narrative concept, for the element of the unknown infuses a game with dramatic tension.

As players make a choice and its uncertain outcomes slowly unfold, new choices present themselves, each emerging option cloaked in its own narrative uncertainty.

4. Core mechanics Whereas uncertainty tends to affect the larger trajectory of a game's narrative arc, core mechanics represent the essential moment-to-moment activity of players. During a game, core mechanics create patterns of repeated behavior, the experiential building blocks of play.

Recognizing games as narrative experience means considering them not just as bits of plot that are arranged and rearranged through interaction, but instead considering them as an ongoing activity in which a player engages with a core mechanic to make meaningful choices and explore a space of possibility. Often, interactive narratives are diagrammed as points connected to lines, with each point representing a piece of text or a segment of video that is accessed by the player.

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3.2 Environmental Storytelling Narrative as a Generator of Design In architecture, there is a dissonance between the aesthetics of many buildings and their storytelling abilities. The use of parti (the formal generator of many building designs) is a product of the Postmodernist focus on form rather than the narrative experience of the building. Meanwhile, our studies of historic buildings up through examples in Modernist architecture, show a belief in the power of space to create an expressive experience, such as in the approach to the Acropolis, the simulated heavenly kingdoms of Gothic churches, or the concept of man rising above nature embodied in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.

Designers should strive to find a balance between the game’s mechanics and their motif—visual themes or narrative patterns. To do this, like Wright, level designers can use their designs to embody both existing narratives and the functional narrative of how a space is used.

Figure 15: Zaha Hadid’s sketches

Figure 16: Approach to the Acropolis diagram

What is environmental storytelling?

American media scholar Henry Jenkins in his essay “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”16 directly connects game space to narrative experience and suggests four ways in which the structuring of game space can facilitate narrative experience.

1. spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; 2. they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; 3. they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; 4. they provide resources for emergent narratives.

As we have seen with our explorations of narrative space, assets embedded into a gamespace can develop unseen characters or provide narrative clues to game action. In games, art assets have the power to be evocative.

3.2.1

Evocative narrative

The ability to translate narrative from one medium to another – to translate Don Juan into a play, an opera, a ballet, produce equivalences that are not made by analogy to an architectural strip of course, but through carefully observed parallels. Whenever a program or “plot” is well known (as are most architectural programs), only the “retelling” counts: the “telling” has been done enough.

16

H.Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture, Article, 2002

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Evocative spaces utilize familiar elements to set a mood, establish the fiction of a game story, or communicate positive or negative events. In the case of Wonderland—a normally cheerful, albeit absurd, place—Alice’s version utilizes twisted recreations of familiar locales, establishing the narrative of a Wonderland ruled by the Queen of Hearts.

Evocative spaces work because of our understanding of the vernacular, the architectural language of certain locales, established through symbol building. Vernacular is useful for contrasting evocative art assets with one another in a scene, showing decay, corruption, or the passage of time.

The Last of Us utilizes the vernacular of urban environments and overgrown forests against one another to create a world twenty years into a zombie apocalypse. Safe zones are mainly urban with militaristic outposts littered throughout, while areas outside the safe zones contrast urban architecture with overgrowth to give a long-abandoned feel.

Evocative vernacular is vital for establishing story, tone, and giving the player some idea of what has happened in a place. This is why we use the next type of narrative space, staging spaces.

3.2.2

Staging spaces/Enacting stories

Spatial stories are stories which respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. The story itself may be structured around the character's movement through space and the features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory.

Narrative stages as both enticing and rewarding spaces where a player feels that important game events will happen. Staging spaces are often unique and of large scale. They are easy to see as a player approaches them and often call attention to themselves through monumental architecture or unique features. They may house either gameplay events such as climactic battles or narrative events such as cutscenes, or scripted events where characters move around the player as he or she plays.

In many ways, staging spaces that are important to actual gameplay can be atmospherically ambiguous. They may be where a player gains an important item, or staging spaces for large battles.

Figure 17: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a unique staging area for two potentially different battle events in the game. In the Sokrovenno region, players either engage in a sniper’s duel with The End, a boss character, or are ambushed by the Ocelot Unit, an elite military group. For these two distinct battle styles, the level needed

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to have both large-scale outlook points from which players and The End could use sniper rifles and smaller hiding spaces for taking cover during the more active Ocelot fight.

Staging spaces do not have to encompass in-game action, but can be exactly what their name implies: stages. In this way, staging spaces can be set up like the set of a film or play, to support the action that characters are taking within a game. Such staging spaces are often goals for the player to reach, and can therefore be used as rewards or as a way to control game pacing.

Figures 18-19: In the case of Kleiner’s lab (HalfLife2), the player is directed to escape the city and reach another staging space, Black Mesa East.

3.2.3

Embedded narrative

"Staged areas...[can] lead the game player to come to their own conclusions about a previous event or to suggest a potential danger just ahead. Some examples include doors that have been broken open, traces of a recent explosion, a crashed vehicle, a piano dropped from a great height, charred remains of a fire."17 Within an open-ended and exploratory narrative structure like a game, essential narrative information must be redundantly presented across a range of spaces and artifacts since one cannot assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize the significance of any given element.

As a result the game designer is thus developing two kinds of narratives: 1. one relatively unstructured and controlled by the player as they explore the game space and unlock its secrets; 2. the other pre-structured but embedded within the mise-en-scene18 awaiting discovery.

The game world becomes a kind of information space, a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot.

Figures 20-21

One striking example is Playdead’s mastery of space and visual language. ,Playdead use the environment to communicate just enough to give the player an inkling of how its machinations may work. The horror extends to a narrative told entirely through environment and mechanics, 17 18

H.Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture, Article, 2002 Chapter 5.1.3

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creating a deeply unsettling world that taps into themes like manipulation, persecution and societal free-will.

When working from either mechanics or motif as the foundation of a game and level designs, it is important to create a dialog between the two. It is worth asking:  What are the important narrative elements of the game?  What actions will support the narrative?  Can those actions be translated into gameplay mechanics?

Embedded narrative spaces can be created with environment art by leaving evidence of use by characters or events that previously transpired in the space.

Figure 22: Left 4 Dead players can see the writings of previous survivors who passed through safe houses, leaving information about the zombie plague, establishing the scope of the outbreak, and developing other unseen characters.

3.2.4

Emerging narrative

Previous examples of narrative space have shown how spaces are created to embody narrative context through environment art, spatial quality, or as capsules for character dialog.

These examples can, however, be passive if not used in the context of interactive narrative. Both architecture and gamespace have the advantage of interactivity—user interaction gives them meaning.

In games, landmarks and interactive elements give users incentives to utilize level spaces for more than just travel. The use of these objects gives players various ways of dispatching one another beyond core mechanics, allowing for rich meta-game narratives that are fondly remembered long after players have put the game away.

Emergent narratives are not pre-structured or pre-programmed. They take shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating. Choices about the design and organization of game spaces have narratological consequences. In the case of emergent narratives, game spaces are designed to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the storyconstructing activity of players.

As players engage the rules of a game system, they create their own series of events that drives the game action forward. The set of actions taken by one player is usually different from the actions of his or her friends or other players around the world.

Figure 23: The arenas in party fighting games such as Towerfall include many interactive objects within a confined space that provide rich opportunities for emergent narratives.

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4. INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE

CRAFTED INTERACTIVE STORY

VS

IMPROVISED PLAY EXPERIENCE

Embedded narrative:

Emergent narrative:

Pre-generated narrative content that exists prior to a player's interaction with the game.

Designed to provide motivation for the events and actions of the game, players experience embedded narrative as a story context.

Embedded narrative elements tend to resemble the kinds of narrative experiences that linear media provide.

Arises from the set of rules governing interaction with the game system. Unlike embedded narrative, emergent narrative elements arise during play from the complex system of the game, often in unexpected ways.

Most moment-to-moment narrative play in a game is emergent, as player choice leads to unpredictable narrative experiences.

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04 INTERACTIVE NARRATIVE

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Interactive narrative has been defined as “a time-based representation of character and action in which a reader can affect, choose, or change the plot”.19 Derived from experimental literature, the first interactive narratives to be written were text-based hypertexts.20 This kind of branching structure between media chunks has since been applied to multimedia and video based interactive narrative systems.

Sid Meier, the designer of Civilization, has argued that gameplay is “a series of interesting choices.” Interesting choices do not necessarily entail all possible choices in a given situation; rather choices are selectively included and excluded in a procedural representation to produce a desired expressive end.

4.1 Space of possibility Playing a game means interacting with and within a representational universe, a space of possibility with narrative dimensions. Formed by rules and experienced through play, a game is a space of possible action that players activate, manipulate, explore, and transform. When we frame this space of possibility as a narrative space, a special set of questions arise: Where do narratives in a game reside?

How can one design games as narrative experiences?

What kinds of narrative experiences do games make possible?

What is the role of narrative in the design of meaningful play?

Game designer Warren Spector connects this concept to narrative when he states that "games create 'possibility spaces,' spaces that provide compelling problems within an overarching narrative, afford creative opportunities for dealing with these problems and then respond to player choices with meaningful consequences."21 Spector's description of a game's "possibility space" links the embedded “overarching narrative" of a game to the emergent actions and outcomes of moment-to-moment play.

The spatial features of a game have a strong impact on creating the narrative space of possibility. As game scholars Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire explain 22, game designers use spatial elements to set the initial terms for the player's experiences. Information essential to the story is embedded in objects such as books, carved runes or weapons. Artifacts such as jewels may embody friendship or rivalries or may become magical sources of the player's power. The game space is organized so that paths through the game world guide or constrain action, making sure we encounter characters or situations critical to the narrative.

The organization of spatial features in a game is critical to the design of a game's narrative space of possibility. If a designer wants the players to form strong social relations, he/she needs to make sure to create narrative spaces that support social interaction. The spatial design of a house or restaurant in The Sims defines the type of social interactions that can occur there. In Black & White, the spatial features of the game world change in relation to the actions of a player, placing the consequences of player action in a narrative of moral choice.

19

Meadows M. S. 2003. Pause and Effect, the art of interactive narrative. New Riders.

Nelson T. H. 1982. Literary Machines. Mindful Press.

21 Katie Salen and Erik Zimmerman: “Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals” (2003), MIT Press 22 Kurt Squire, Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age, (2011) Teachers College Press 20

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4.1.1 Creating procedural literacy The introduction of game mechanics in possibility spaces aids the development of what designer Ian Bogost calls procedural literacy.23 Procedural literacy is a familiarity with the rules of a game and how they function within an established possibility space. Symbolic assets are an element of this: players for example, learn that certain level surfaces are solid while others may cause damage. These assets are the building blocks of levels, but are also the procedural language of gamespaces.

Bogost highlights the communicative power of such cause-and-effect procedures, arguing that developing procedural literacy in players can not only allow them to be better players of a certain game, but also help in the creation of procedural rhetoric 24—using game rules as a system of communication.

Effective possibility spaces introduce a game’s mechanics and system of symbolic assets to players in such a way where they understand symbols when they are repeated. They also give players opportunities for creating their own emergent narratives by becoming procedurally literate about a game and testing the limits of what they can do in gamespaces.

4.1.2 Design examples Possibility spaces, have a limited and clear set of rules and objects that the player can interact with in the world.

Keeping this world contained to clear boundaries and a limited set of assets also allows players to learn and interact with the symbolic system more effectively. It is the player’s freedom to interact with these symbols, however, that produces the possibility of gameplay emergence.



Overviews

The ability to give players an overview of game possibilities. In many ways, we can attract players with new possibilities in the same way we do with rewards: by showing something previously unseen in a place that the player must explore to find.

In architecture, this could relate to a building that provides a summary of its contents with this reveal, but rewards those who explore further with more information.

A sketch of the atrium of the National Gallery of Art’s East Wing in Washington, D.C.—designed by I.M. Pei and built in 1978. This space offers overviews of the spaces contained in the rest of the museum, but denies full access to them unless the visitor explores further.

23

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, p. 64.

24 See p. 48

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These vistas allow players in games to see out over the game world and discover the limits of its possibility space.

Figure vxv Assasin’s Creed top views enable players to have a clear view of the city and decide where to head next.



Tours

A tour is an initial introduction to gamespaces and their mechanics through a linear level experience.

Half Life 2, Citadel prison pods Half Life 2 Citadel, grants the player a tour to its facilities and universe mechanics, with comprehensive systems of railways for transporting and storing the Cells.

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4.2 Possible structures of interactive narrative Branching narrative structures are fundamental within game design, where in many cases branching decisions may be made automatically based upon the consequences of play.

Possible structures that an interactive narrative may have include: -

Linear narrative

-

Tree (or branching narrative)

-

Exploratorium (or fishbone narrative): a linear structure in which the player can pause to explore the surroundings

-

Parallel narrative: different versions of the story are told at the same time and the reader/viewer can switch between the different parallel versions

-

Threaded narrative: The perfect structure for telling a story through multiple points-of-view. Threads can link together or stay totally separate.

-

Concentric narrative: a structure which orbits around a shared central point. Viewers can choose which path they take, in whatever order they fancy but they always return to this core area.

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-

nodal, or dead-end narrative: typical for action/adventure games, involving numerous alternative paths and dead-ends, which may or may not be (but usually are) reversible, generally along a main sequence eventually leading from the beginning of the game to the end.

-

modulated, or the dynamic labyrinth narrative: provides constellations of interactive choices, but only allowing access to a new set of possible interactions after the player has experienced different parts of the story. Game levels function in this way.

-

an open narrative in which sets of story elements are associated with different physical places; links between places are open, so the player can wander around discovering different elements of the story.

This is the form typical of early adventure games.

-

an open narrative in which there is no story arc. This is the form typical of simulation-based games, strategy games and open world-based games, like massively-multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs) [23].

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4.3 Molecule level spaces Designers Luke McMillan and Nassib Azar, who is himself a former architect, in their Gamasutra article “The Metrics of Space: Molecule Design,”25 highlight a methodology for spatial organization based on the arrangement of gamespaces, how players reach one from another, and how designers can allow or disallow access between them for interesting play scenarios.

4.3.1

The Basics of Molecule Design

McMillan and Azar’s concept of molecule design is primarily focused on the relationship between play spaces, treated in their graphs as nodes and edges.

- Nodes are the play spaces themselves—areas with significant enemy encounters, item pickups, spawn points, or opportunities for action.

- Edges describe the relationship between these spaces, be they visual or spatial (as in you can travel from one to another).

MOLECULE DIAGRAM This molecule diagram establishes links between nodal gamespaces with the use of edges. A visual language has been established for edges to help describe elements of three-dimensionality as shown in the accompanying plan and section drawings of the level. Molecules describe relationships rather than actual level space.

In level design, form often follows core mechanics.

Likewise, nodal gamespaces in molecule diagrams can represent areas where the player employs unique or intense applications of the game’s core mechanics: big gun fights, sharp turns, boss battles, difficult platforming, etc. These nodes are also opportunities to emphasize the genius loci of the game level. Molecule diagrams may also describe spaces where spatial size changes significantly.

PLAN

SECTION 25

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/184783/the_metrics_of_space_molecule_.php

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

LEVEL MAP



MAP DIAGRAM

This drawing and molecule diagram of a multiplayer map from Halo 4 shows how players move from intimate hallway spaces into prospect nodes where they may gain strategic advantages over one another.



MOLECULE DIAGRAM

FIRE CLIFFS

ICE CLIFFS

BRIDGE

BUNKER

BUNKER

BLUE BASE

RED BASE

RAVINE

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4.3.2

Form follows gameplay with proximity diagrams

Level designers begin their design with a vision of the types of gameplay experiences it should have. This form follows function approach allows us to relate our level designs to the mechanics of the games we are designing them for.

_Molecule and proximity diagrams Molecule design diagrams are very similar to a diagram type that architects use to organize building program requirements. Proximity diagrams, like molecule diagrams, are made up of bubbles and connected with lines. The bubbles represent rooms or spaces that are to be part of the building and are sized according to square footage requirements for these spaces.

Likewise, lines connecting the bubbles are sized according to how important it is for them to be adjacent. Also like molecule diagrams, proximity diagrams are not actual spatial plans. They are a tool for analyzing the functional idea for a building, but should not be understood as its final spatial plan.

PROXIMITY DIAGRAM

A building proximity diagram. Each bubble is sized according to the required square footage of a space. The sizes of lines show the necessity of spaces being adjacent in the final building.

A proximity diagram for a multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) level. In this example, it is important for each sniper position to have a view of the main competition area for each spawn point to have access to gear. Despite the layout of the diagram, the final design can (and should) look drastically different.

Proximity diagrams can be used for level design as they would be used for real-world architecture. The sizes and type of line used to connect the bubbles can describe proximity priority and the type of connection spaces have. For example, it may be important for sniping positions to have a view of a large prospect space in a map, even if the player must actually travel a long set of corridors to get there.

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4.4 Game narrative spaces Different layouts provide different qualities for player navigation. Designers are not confined to just one layout for their game space.

There are seven common patterns of layouts: 1. Open layout Represents the outdoors and gives the player the freedom to wander about.

The settings mimic their corresponding worlds in real-life and thus have few, if any, visible spatial boundaries.

2. Linear layout: It is not bound to any particular shape, but it does ensure a fixed sequence for the player to experience (tracks and trails)

3. Parallel layout Variation of the linear layout. It is like tracks with switches that allow the player to switch from one track to another.

4. Ring layout Makes the player’s path return to the starting point, which is often used by racing games.

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5. Network layout Provides more ways of connecting spaces and gives the player more freedom compared with a layout with tracks.

6. Hub and-spoke layout Starts the player from a hub in the centre. The player can go out of the hub to a space but will have to return to the hub before heading out to another space.

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5. SPACE AND DISCOURSE

05 SPACE AND DISCOURSE

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Since spatiality is a crucial element of any game, we need to understand game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects. In order to tell stories, game designers and architects, who are most often schooled in computer science or graphic design, need to be retooled in the basic vocabulary of narrative theory.

5.1 Space vs program To what extent could the literary narrative shed light on the organization of events in buildings, whether called “use”, “functions”, “activities”, or “programs”? If writers could manipulate the structure of stories the same way as they twist vocabulary and grammar, couldn’t architects do the same, organizing the program in a similarly objective, detached, or imaginative way?

Raising these questions proved increasingly stimulating: conventional organizations of spaces could be matched to the most surrealistically absurd sets of activities.

A narrative not only presupposes a sequence but also a language. The “language” of architecture, the architecture that “speaks” is a controversial matter. In recent years serious research has applied linguistic theory to architecture. This research introduces preoccupations with the notion of subjectivity in language, differentiating language as a system of signs, from language as an act accomplished by an individual.

Roland Barthe’s “Introduction to structural analysis of narrative” provides the essential foundations of establishing new tools in narrative theory, drawing links between linguistics and literary analysis. The research reveals that the way a critic approaches a literary text in much the same way that a linguist approaches a sentence.

Bernard Tschumi wonders if such an architectural narrative corresponds to the narrative of literature, would space intersect with signs to give us a discourse?

5.2 Architecture and language In the past, architecture gave linguistic metaphors (the Castle, the Structure, the Labyrinth) to society. It may now provide the cultural model. Architecture when equated with language can only be read as a series of fragments which make up an architectural reality.

Fragments of architecture (bits of walls, rooms, streets, of ideas) are all one actually sees.

These fragments are like beginnings without ends. There is always a split between fragments that are real and fragments that are virtual, between memory and fantasy. These splits have no existence other than being the passage from one fragment to another. They are relays rather than signs. They are traces. They are in between.

It is not the clash between these contradictory fragments that counts, but the movement between them. And this invisible movement is neither a part of language nor of structure, it is nothing but a constant and mobile relationship between language itself.

How these fragments are organized, matters little: volume, height, surface, degree of enclosure. These fragments are like sentences between quotation marks. Yet they are no quotations. They may be experts from different discourses, but this only demonstrates that an architectural project is precisely where differences find an overall expression.

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5.3 The language of narrative 5.3.1 Semiotics of language _Structural linguistics Structuralist narrative theorists26 have derived a model of several layers of narrative meaning (Figure 1). The structuralist approach was initially formulated in the structural linguistics of Sausseure1.

Sausseure made the fundamental distinction between:  a language (la langue) and  the speech acts facilitated by the language (la parole).

5.3.2 Semiotics of narrative _Structural narrative theory Structural narrative theory involves more than Saussure’s simple two level system. Specific narratives are understood as the instances in time that express stories.

Narration The act or process of production of the text.

Narrative The text itself. The concept of narrative deals more with how the events are told. It is the ordering of events into a consumable format. It concerns itself with the sequence of the events, the medium on which they are told and the way these events are put together into one coherent unit.

Story A ‘story’ is, in simplest terms, a sequence of events.

It consists of a set of relevant events in chronological order (A,B,C,D).

Plot Between the levels of narrative and story there is a further question of which aspects of the story are expressed by a narrative. This is the level of the plot, where “… plot, story-as-discourse, exists at a more general level than any particular objectification, any given movie, novel or whatever … Its function is to emphasise or de-emphasise certain story-events, to interpret some and to leave others to inference, to show or to tell, to comment or to remain silent, to focus on this or that aspect of an event or character” 26 Stam R., Burgoyne R., and S. Flitterman-Lewis. 1992. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. Routledge

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Plot describes a set of events as they relate to each other. The term is concerned with how to sequence and select the events of a story as a structure for its telling and how that telling can find maximum effect.

The plot usually concerns itself with specific points of the story and the pattern of their relation while narrative is the method and means by which one constructs the events of a story into a plot.

Identification of several levels of narrative meaning clarifies the relationships between different strategies for interactive narrative and story construction. How narrative concepts are to be interpreted depends a great deal on the specific form of digital media system in question.

Examples of media systems of this kind include classic hypertexts and interactive movies having a link structure (described in detail below) through which the viewer/reader chooses a path.

Interactivity in this case can be created either within or between levels in the classic narrative model. Branching within levels involves providing authored branching pathways from which the reader/viewer may select within a representation of the story, plot or narrative levels. In this case:

Figure 1: Layers of meaning in narrative texts.

This level of generative substructure is analogous to Saussure’s language level. From the generative sublevel it is possible to create a great many stories. Each story can be the source for many plots, and each plot can be expressed in many narratives.

Viewing this as a hierarchy, it can be seen that, beginning with the narrative level and going down to the structural substrate, each level down has an increasing generative potential in terms of the number of actual narratives that it facilitates and by which it is expressed.

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5.4 Level of discourse Narratives may involve a reordering of the events of a story:  The story’s events can be set out of chronological order;  be combined with elements from outside of the story to better tell the consumer what is going on; or  to build dramatic effect. Sometimes a narrative may draw attention to things or events the story lacks, because the contrast is interesting.

The level of narrative structure can also be referred to as the discourse level.

1.

Beyond the sentence

Discourse: an organized arrangement of sentences, which is perceived as the message of another “language” functioning at a higher level than the language of linguistics: discourse has its units, its rules, its ‘grammar’.

Because it lies beyond the sentence, and though consisting of nothing but sentences, discourse must naturally be the object of a second linguistics. This linguistics of discourse has for a very long time had a very famous name: rhetorics.

2.

The levels of meaning

In order to carry out a structural analysis it is necessary first to distinguish several levels of description and to place these levels within a hierarchical (integrative) perspective.

In its own way rhetoric has assigned two planes of description to discourse: disposition and elocution.  Disposition is the orderly arrangement of the things invented.  Elocution is the application of proper words and sentences to invention.

Tzvetan Todorov (Russian formalist): suggests working on two large levels: 1. The story (argument) which consists of a logic of actions and a “syntax” of characters and 2. The discourse, comprising tenses, aspects and mode pertaining to narrative.

5.4.1 Constructing oratory In classical antiquity, rhetoric was understood as part of the oratory. Aristotle draws a correlation between the two modes of human reason:  induction and  deduction.

While in rhetoric:  the equivalent to induction is the example, and  the equivalent to deduction is the enthymeme.

Like procedural figures, rhetorical figures define the possibility space for rhetorical practice. Many rhetorical figures are familiar by virtue of our common experience with them:

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

Antithesis (juxtaposition of contrasting ideas) “A dead end will only stop you if you don't try to move through it.”

This message in Antichamber, forces the player to look at an element that otherwise functions as boundary, in a contrasting manner.



Paradox (seemingly self-contradictory statement that produces insight or truth)

Using non-Euclidian geometry, a paradox occurs when a path is revealed only from a particular perspective that enables the player to cross it and return right where they started.



Oxymoron (highly compressed paradox) Both sets of stairs will lead back to the start.

This is the first of many puzzles where the player must think outside the box to find the solution, even though the solution in this case will lead to a dead end.



Aporia (feigning flummox about the best way to approach a proposition) This puzzle teaches the player not to trust his/her surroundings and look beyond what he/she can see. Curiosity for what might hide in the dark/different direction than prescribed is rewarded with different narrative stages.



Irony (evoking contrary meaning to yield scorn) Different outcomes occur whether the player decides to act as advised (in this case walk), or do the exact opposite (jump), with the narrative commenting on the player’s action.

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Rhetoric also comes to refer to effective expression, that is, writing, speech, or art that both accomplishes the goals of the author and absorbs the reader or viewer. Kenneth Burke defines the rhetoric as a part of the practice for identification as “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents”.

Burke’s understanding of humans as creators and consumers of symbolic systems, expands rhetoric to include non-verbal domains. He does not explicitly delineate all the domains to which rhetoric could apply; instead he embraces the broadness of human symbolic production in the abstract. “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is meaning, there is persuasion.”

5.4.2 Visual rhetoric Visual rhetoric requires visual “arguments” which supply us with reasons for accepting a point of view. (J. Anthony Blair) The emergence of photographic and cinematic expression in the 19 th and 20th centuries suggests a need to understand how these new, non-verbal media mount arguments. This subfield is called visual rhetoric.

Marguerite Helmers and Charles A. Hill explain: “Rhetoricians working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives are beginning to pay a substantial amount of attention to issues of visual rhetoric. Through analysis of photographs and drawings, graphs and tables, and motion pictures, scholars are exploring the ways in which visual elements are used to influence people ’s attitudes, opinions and beliefs.”

Visual rhetoric remains an emerging discipline.

The very notion of a visual rhetoric reinforces the idea that rhetoric is a general field of inquiry, applicable to multiple media and modes of inscription. To address the possibilities of a new medium as a type of rhetoric, we must identify how inscription works in that medium, and then how arguments can be constructed through those modes of inscription.

Emphasizing the dark and grimy nature of poverty, Gustave Dore27 concentrates on the darkness under the rail, allowing the upper-class visitor to see into the dark back-courts of London slum dwellings.

5.4.3 Digital rhetoric Visual rhetoric is often at work in videogames, a medium that deploys both still and moving images. A study for visual rhetoric in games would need to address the disputes of the former field, especially the rift between psychological and cultural discourses about manipulation and phenomenal impact on the one hand and logical liberation on the other.

Image: Over London, by Rail – one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Blanchard Jerrold ’s London: A Pilgrimage (1872).

27

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But virtual rhetoric cannot account for procedural representation. In procedural media like videogames, images are frequently constructed, selected or sequenced in code, making the tools of visual rhetoric inadequate. Image is subordinate to process.

Like virtual rhetoricians, digital rhetoricians hope to revise and reinvent rhetorical theory for a new medium. What is missing is a digital rhetoric that addresses the unique properties of computation, like procedurality, to find a new rhetorical practice.

5.4.4 Procedural rhetoric Procedural rhetoric is the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively. Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes.

About persuasive games – The expressive power of videogames Videogames are uniquely, consciously and principally crafted as expressions. They service representational goals akin to literature, art and film, as opposed to instrumental goals akin to utilities and tools. As such, they represent excellent candidates for rhetorical speech – persuasion and expression are inexorably linked.

Videogames open a new domain for persuasion, thanks to their core representational mode, procedurality. This is a new form that can be expressed as procedural rhetoric, the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than spoken words, writing, images, or moving pictures.

Videogames are computational artifacts that have cultural meaning as computational artifacts. They carry a unique persuasive power. Recent movements in the videogame industry, most notably the so-called “Serious Games” movement, have sought to create videogames to support existing social and cultural positions. But videogames are capable of much more. In addition to becoming instrumental tools, videogames can also disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially significant long-term change.

This does not rely so much in the content of these videogames, as in the way they mount claims through procedural rhetorics.

In procedural rhetoric, arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models.

Procedural rhetorics afford a new and promising way to make claims about how things work.  Procedurality refers to a way of creating, explaining or understanding processes. And processes define the way things work: the methods, techniques, and logic that drive the operation of systems, from mechanical systems like engines, to organizational systems like schools, to conceptual systems like faith.  Rhetoric refers to effective and persuasive expression.

Procedural rhetoric then, is the practice of using processes persuasively. Just as verbal rhetoric is useful for both the orator and the audience, so procedural rhetoric is useful for both the programmer and the user, the game designer and the player.

Ways of Using Procedural Rhetoric:  Interrogating Ideology One use of procedural rhetoric is to expose and explain the hidden ways of thinking that often drive social, political, or cultural behavior.  Making and Unpacking an Argument Video games that expose ideology may or may not do so intentionally. But video games can also be created to make explicit claims about the way a material or conceptual system works.

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Any social or cultural practice can be understood as a set of processes, and our understanding of each of them can be taught, supported, or challenged through video games.

When we learn to play games with an eye toward uncovering their procedural rhetorics, we learn to ask questions about the models such games present.

The kind of technology literacy that procedural rhetoric offers is becoming increasingly necessary for kids and adults alike. As more of our cultural attention moves from linear media like books and film to procedural, random-access media like software and video games, we need to become better critics of the latter kind.

We must recognize the persuasive and expressive power of procedurality. Processes influence us. They seed changes in our attitudes, which in turn and over time, change our culture.

As players of videogames we should recognize procedural rhetoric as a new way to interrogate our world, to commend on it, to disrupt and challenge it.

J. Anthony Blair countered that vivid images may increase presence, but they do not necessarily mount arguments. Even if images successfully cause viewers to take certain actions, those viewers are more likely manipulated than persuaded. Visual arguments “lack the dialectical aspect of the process of interaction between the arguer and the interlocutors, who raise questions or objections”.

Procedural rhetoric must address two issues that arise from this discussion: 1. What is the relationship between procedural representation and vividness?

2. What is the relationship between procedural representation and dialectics?

5.4.5 Rhetorical structures of procedural arguments “I choose to define interactivity in terms of a conversation: a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think and speak. The quality of the interaction depends on the quality of each of the subtasks (listening, thinking and speaking).”

Chris Crawford Understanding the relationship between the three can offer clues into the rhetorical structure of a procedural argument. Videogames require user action to complete their procedural representations. As such, they provide particularly promising opportunities for the procedural translation of rhetorical devices like enthymeme.

Meaning in videogames is constructed not through a re-creation of the world, but through selectively modeling appropriate elements for that world. Interactivity follows suit: the total number and credibility of user actions is not necessarily important; rather, the relevance of the interaction in the context of the representational goals of the system is paramount.

Videogames offer a particularly good context for this selective interactivity.

Making conversations Procedural rhetorics expose the way things work, but it is reflection that creates and prolongs this process. Criticism is one aspect of this reflective process.

Players contextualize functional networks in their own social context, where they subject them to uniquely individual consideration. In some cases these conversations might take place between multiple parties. In other cases, the conversation takes place internally; the player asks himself questions about the intersection of a products’ features with his own routines and values.

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Procedural rhetorics persuade through intervention, by setting the stage for a new understanding unthinkable in the present.

5.4.6 Towards a more sophisticated interactivity Sophisticated interactivity means greater responsiveness, tighter symbolic coupling between user actions and procedural representations.

In the context of procedural rhetoric, it is useful to consider interactivity in relation to the Aristotelian enthymeme. The enthymeme, is the technique in which a proposition in a syllogism is omitted; the listener (in the case of an oratory) is expected to fill in the missing proposition and complete the claim.

Sophisticated interactivity can produce an effective procedural enthymeme, resulting in more sophisticated procedural rhetoric.

REPRESENTATION

PLAYER’S SUBJECTIVITY

SIMULATION GAP Ian Bogost claims that the ontological position of a videogame (or simulation or procedural system) resides in the gap between rule-based representation and player subjectivity; he calls the space “simulation gap�.

Another way to think about the simulation gap is in relation to rhetoric. A procedural model like a videogame could be seen as a system of nested enthymemes, individual procedural claims that the player literally completes through interaction.

5.5 Levels of narrative model Identification of several levels of narrative meaning clarifies the relationships between different strategies for interactive narrative and story construction. How narrative concepts are to be interpreted depends a great deal on the specific form of digital media system in question.

Examples of media systems of this kind include classic hypertexts and interactive movies having a link structure (described in detail below) through which the viewer/reader chooses a path.

Interactivity in this case can be created either within or between levels in the classic narrative model. Branching within levels involves providing authored branching pathways from which the reader/viewer may select within a representation of the story, plot or narrative levels. In this case: 1 a branching story structure involves interactive selection/determination of a representation of specific set of events, characters and settings constituting a story based upon a predefined set of potential events, characters and settings

2 a branching plot structure provides alternative pathways through the representation of an overall plot related to a common story; the events, characters and settings of the story remain unchanged, but those narrated to the reader/viewer are interactively determined

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3 a branching narrative in the strict sense provides interactive selection of narrated elements conveying particular plot elements in particular ways

- creation of a story from a structural substrate; - creation of a plot from a story

- creation of a specific narrative from a plot Figure 1: Layers of meaning in narrative texts.

There is no doubt that narrative is a hierarchy of levels.

To understand a narrative it is not only to follow the unfolding of the story but also to recognize it as a number of levels; to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative onto an implicitly vertical axis. To read (or listen) to a narrative is not only to pass from one word to another but also from one level to the next.

We propose to distinguish three levels in any narrative work:

functions actions narration

STORY

1. The determination of units Since any unit can be defined as a combination of units pertaining to certain known classes, the first step is to break down the narrative and determine whatever segments of narrative discourse can be distributed into a limited number of classes; in other words to define the smallest narrative units.

Meaning must be the first criterion by which units are determined.

It is the functional character of certain segments of the story that makes units of them, hence the name “functions”. The “soul” of any function is its “seedlike” quality, which enables the function to inseminate the narrative with an element that will later come to maturity on the same level or elsewhere.

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For example, when in the movie Titanic the director informs the audience of the existence of a particular amulet, it is because this amulet is to play an important role in the story: the enunciation of this detail (whichever linguistic form it may assume) constitutes a function, a narrative unit.

Is everything functional in a narrative?

Is everything down to the most minute detail meaningful?

Can narrative be integrally broken into functional units?

The fact remains that narrative is solely made up of functions: everything in one way or another is significant. It is not though so much a matter of art, as it is a matter of structure.

When we are told that Bond upon hearing the telephone ring while on duty in his Secret Service office “picked up one of his four receivers” the moneme four constitutes in itself a functional unit, for it refers to a concept that is necessary to the story as a whole (one of a highly technical bureaucracy).

2. Classes of units Some units correlate with units on the same level (distributional), while others cannot be fulfilled without switching to another level (integrative).

There are two main classes of units:  the functions and  the indices, which account for a certain classification of narratives.

Some narratives are predominantly functional (such as popular tales) while some others are predominantly indicial (such as “psychological” novels). Within each of those two broad classes two subclasses of narrative units can easily be determined.

1. Functions

Cardinal functions (nuclei) Constitute actual hinges of the narrative

2. Indices

Catalyses

Indices

A personality trait, a feeling, or an atmosphere, a philosophy

“Fill in” the narrative space separating the hinge type functions

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Bits of information

Identify or pinpoint certain elements of time and space

The cardinal functions are the risk-laden moments of a narrative.

Between the disjunctive points or “dispatchers”, the catalyses open up areas of security, rest or luxury; such “luxuries” however are not useless. The enduring function of catalysis is that it maintains contact between the narrator and the reader.

To sum up, one cannot delete the nucleus without altering the story, but then again one cannot delete a catalysis without altering the discourse.  

Ie. To say that Bond is on duty in his office, while through his open window heavy billowing clouds can be seen obscuring the moon, is to index a stormy summer night, a deduction that can in turn be translated into an atmospherical index pointing to the heavy, anguish-laden climate of an action, as yet unknown to the reader.

Whatever serves as informant is a realistic operator and to that extent, it possesses an undeniable functionality.

Nuclei and catalyses, indices and informants, are as it seems the initial classes into which the units of the functional level can be distributed. Catalyses, indices and informants have one character in common: they are expansions in their relations with nuclei.

1.

Functional syntax

How, according to what “grammar” are the different units linked together in the narrative syntagm?

Is it possible to uncover behind the temporal sequence of the narrative an a-temporal logic?

Three main trends of research are emerging: 1. The first, initiated by Bremond, is more properly logical in its approach:

2. The second model is linguistic:

3. Analytical process on the level of “Actions”

The goal is to reconstruct the syntax of human behavior as exemplified in narrative, to trace the succession of “choices” which this or that character inevitably has to face at various points in the story, and thus to bring light into what could be called an energetic logic, since characters are caught at the moment when they choose to act.

Identify paradigmatic oppositions in the functions and then “ project” these oppositions onto the syntagmatic axis of narrative, according to the Jacobsonian definition of the poetic principle.

Tries to figure out the rules which attend the combinations, variations and transformations in narrative, of a certain number of fundamental predicates. The wide span of functional arrangement in narrative imposes an organization based on relays, whose basic units can be no other than a small group of functions which will be referred to as sequence.

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Elements of the communicational syntax verbal

B. Corresponding to these six factors,

communication is composed of six

depending on the factor emphasized in

factors:

a specific message, are six functions:

A. Any

given

act

of

1.

Addresser (speaker, narrator, author)

1.

2.

Addressee (hearer, reader, viewer, user)

2.

3.

Code (system)

4.

Emotive (expressive - a cry, a sigh: emphasis on addresser) Conative (appellative - ordering, begging: emphasis on addressee)

3.

Metalingual (linguistic: focus on code)

Message (text; discourse, what is being said)

4.

Poetic

5.

Context (referent; about what?)

5.

6.

Contact (channel of communication; psychological or physical connection)

6.

Referential (denotative - journalistic: focus on context) Phatic ("hello, hello"; "are you angry?"emphasis on contact, clearing channel for communication)

The focus within the verbal message on one of the six factors, creates a message corresponding to a certain function. All other functions are always there as well but are subordinate to the dominant one. When the focus is on the message itself the function of the message, according to Jacobson, is poetic.

5.6 The system of narrative The creation of a game narrative is really the creation of a narrative system. As a design problem, creating the narrative elements of a game is very much like creating other aspects of your game. You are crafting a system of parts, simple elements that interrelate to form a complex whole. The meanings that emerge from a system arise out of the individual relationships between elements, as well as the more global patterns that emerge across many sets of smaller relationships.

Language can be defined by the concurrence of two fundamental processes: - the process of articulation or segmentation, which produces units (forms), and - the process of integration which collects these units into units of a higher rank (meaning).

This double process has its counterpart in the language of narrative which also recognizes an articulation and an integration, a form and a meaning.

In the language of narrative, the second important process is integration: what has been disjoined at a certain level (a sequence, for example) is often united again at a higher level.

It is integration which permits orienting the comprehension of discontinuous, contiguous, and heterogeneous elements (as they are given by the syntagm, which knows only one dimension: succession); each unit is perceived in its surfacing and in its depth, and that is how the narrative "proceeds": between the strong code of language and the strong code of narrative, is established, so to speak, a hollow or a through: the sentence.

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5.6.1 Form Distortion and expansion Form in narrative is marked essentially by two governing forces:



The dispersion of signs throughout the story and



The insertion of unpredictable expansions among them

Sign distortions exist in language: Dystaxy occurs as soon as the signs are no longer juxtaposed, as soon as the linear (logical) order is disturbed. Dealing with the functional level this is exactly what happens in the narrative: the units of a sequence may form a whole at the level of this particular sentence, and yet be separated from each other by insertion of units of other sentences.

Each point in a narrative radiates to several directions at a time: When James Bond orders a whiskey while waiting for the plane, this whiskey considered as an index has a polysemic value: It is sort of a symbolic node that attracts and combines several signifieds (modernity, wealth, leisrure). But considered as a functional unit, the ordering of a whiskey must work its way through several relays (consumption, waiting, departure) before it reaches its final meaning: the unit is “claimed” by the whole of narrative, yet the “narrative” hangs together only through the distortion and irradiation of its units.

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5.6.2 Meaning Mimesis and meaning28 Narrative integration does not offer the appearance of smooth regularity, like that of a fine architectural design which would lead from a variety of simple elements up to a few complex masses; a unit often appears as a single unit, yet it may have two correlates, one at a certain level (a function within a sequence), the other at a different level (an index pointing to an actant).

In narrative thus dystaxy initiates a “horizontal” reading while integration superimposes on it a “vertical” reading.

The creativity of narrative could be situated between two codes, the linguistic code and the translinguistic code. Art is a matter of enunciating details whereas imagination involves a mastery of the code.

The function of the narrative is not to “represent”; it is to put together a scene which still retains a certain enigmatic character for the reader, but does not belong to the mimetic order in any way. The “Reality” of a sequence does not lie in the natural order of actions that make it up, but in the logic that is unfolded, exposed, and finally confirmed in the midst of the sequence.

Narrative does not make people “see”, it does not imitate; it is the passion to discover meaning, it is a striving towards a higher order of relation, which also carries its emotions, its hopes, threats, triumphs.

For Jackobson29, it is axiomatic that “speech implies a selection of certain linguistic entities and their combination into linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity.” He draws on Ferdinand Saussere’s conception of language as consisting of a syntagmatic axis (concerning positioning) and a paradigmatic axis (concerning substitution). The paradigmatic relation describes the possibility of exchanging words in a sentence, whereas the syntagm describes a larger entity that contains a meaning in itself.

Language is thus characterized by two complementary yet radically opposed operations: 1. selection and 2. combination.

A sentence is constructed by selecting certain linguistic entities and combining them into a linguistic unit.

This underlying conception of language can be represented schematically as follows:

Combination (Syntagm, Metonymy, Contiguity) Integration

Selection (Paradigm, Metaphor, Similarity) Dystaxy Jackobson, mentions two axes of language, metaphor and metonymy, where the distinctions between those two figures of speech is the key to understanding all human discourse and all human behavior.

28 29

Roman jakobson's "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasie Disturbances" Narrative Negotiations: Information Structures in Literary Fiction

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Jackobson relates these two characteristics of language (selection and combination), to the stylistic phenomena of metonymy (combination) and metaphor (selection), and proposes a theory of language oscillating between these two poles. Selection has to do with perceiving similarity and is therefore the process by which metaphor is generated, whereas metonymy involves combination because it has to do with relations between things that stand in a contiguous relation to one another. The context of the word thus becomes highly important.

5.7 Towards a new architectural language Bernard Tschumi states that architectural sequences can be made strategically disjunctive.

Both the Transcripts and La Villette employ different elements of a strategy of disjunction. This strategy takes the form of a systematic exploration of one or more themes: for example, frames and sequences in the case of the Transcripts, and superimposition and repetition in La Villette.

Throughout his work he dismantles any architectural meaning, showing that it is never transparent but socially produced, aiming at a new critical approach that questioned the humanist assumptions of style. This is particularly evident in his work at the Park de la Villette, where it’s three autonomous and superimposed systems of synthesis result to endless combinatory possibilities of the Folies and give way to a multiplicity of impressions.

Figure x: sketches of Park de la Villette

Each observer will project his own interpretation, resulting in an account that will again be interpreted (according to psychanalytic, sociological or other methodologies) and so on.

The program30 plays the same role as narrative in other domains: it can and must be reinterpreted, rewritten deconstructed by the architect. 31 Bernard Tschumi Tschumi then proceeds to address that today’s cultural circumstances, in its disruptions and disjunctions, its characteristic fragmentation and dissociation, suggest the need to discard established categories of meaning and contextual histories. Consequently he introduces two fundamental notions, in the new making of architecture:

5.7.1 Dis-construction It seems important to think, not in terms of principles of formal composition, but rather of questioning structures- that is, the order, techniques, and procedures that are entailed by any architecture work. Disjunction becomes a systematic and theoretical tool for the making of 30 31

See p. 22-23 B. Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, MIT Press, 1996

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architecture. Architecture is constantly subject to reinterpretation. In no way can architecture today claim permanence of meaning.

So a question arises: How can architecture remain a means by which society explores new territories and develops new technologies?

“There are no facts only an infinity of interpretations” Nietzsche Dis-constructing architecture in this research, comes in the form of speculating over the power of space to become a dynamic narrative element, responding to player’s inputs and actions and revealing the appropriate narrative sequences. Thus space is not considered as static, but as a system that enables interactivity and respects each player’s subjectivity in play, resulting in different individual experiences.

5.7.2 De-construction “Deconstructing” a given program means showing that the program could challenge the very ideology it implied. And deconstructing architecture involved dismantling its conventions, using concepts derived both from architecture and from elsewhere – from cinema, literary criticism, and other disciplines. Contaminations implies a progressive shift from one reality to another (ie. vocabulary by Mallarme, syntax by Proust; plan by Le Corbusier, walls and columns by Mies van der Rohe).

Architects possess the possibility of constructing conditions that will create new relationships between spaces and events. Architecture is not about the conditions of design but also the design of conditions that will dislocate the most traditional and regressive aspects of our society and simultaneously reorganize these elements in the most liberating way, so that our experience becomes the experience of events organized and strategized through architecture.

Strategy is a key word in architecture today.

No more masterplans, no more locating a fixed place, but a new heterotopia. And this heterotopia is exactly where in videogames finds its most immediate application.

De-construction in this research, comes in the form of deconstructing the fundamental concepts of contemporary architectural design, dismantling the “form follows function” notion and all its static concerns, in order to integrate a new reality in the field of design: that of game theory modelling, to see how it can be used to create meaningful narrative experiences.

5.7.3 Designing to persuade the player Videogames represent the gap between procedural representation and individual subjectivity. Persuasion is related to the player’s ability to see and understand the simulation author’s implicit or explicit claims about the logic of the situation represented.32 “Simulation authors” says Gonzalo Frasca33 “do not represent a particular event, but a series of potential events. Because of this, they have to think about their objects as systems and consider which are the laws that rule their behaviors. In a similar way, people who interpret simulations create a mental model of it by inferring the rules that govern it. In such simulations,

32

I. Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power Of Videogames, MIT Press, 2007 G. Frasca, Videogames of the Oppressed: Videogames as a means for critical thinking and debate, Georgia Institut of Technology, 2001 33

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the goal of the player would be to analyze, contest and revise the models’ rules according to his/her personal ideas and beliefs.”

Persuasive games expose the logic of situations in an attempt to draw the player’s attention to an eventual site and encourage them to problematize the situation. Videogames themselves cannot produce events; they are after all, representations. But they can help members of a situation address the logic that guides it and begin to make movements to improve it.

5.7.4 Designing a simulation The concept of simulation lies at the intersection of representation and dynamic systems.

As simulations, games create representations, but they do so in a very particular way: through the process of play itself.

A game creates representations in many ways, from its instruction manual text and imaginative fictive world to the visual design of its spaces and the audio design of its soundtrack.

At the center of all of these depictions is the game system itself. Procedures, sets of behaviors, forms of interaction is the raw material from which simulations are constructed.

A simulation can be defined as "an operating representation of central features of reality." 34 We call this form of depiction procedural representation. In addition to exploring the mechanisms of procedural representation, we also investigate the relationship of those representations to the world outside the game. Considering not only how a game simulates, but also what it simulates raises questions regarding the relationship between the artificial world of a game and the "real life" contexts it intersects.

What is the relationship between a simulation, a model, a metaphor, and the real-world?

The general concept of a simulation is certainly not restricted to games. For example, economists and sociologists use simulations to study mathematical relationships among variables, often as a set of equations that process data. Any game can be considered a simulation. 35

5.7.5 Designing conflict The real world offers a vast set of phenomena to simulate—animals behaving, plants growing, structures buckling. Any process is a candidate. Every verb in the dictionary suggests an idea.

Why then, do games seem to focus on a narrow range of processes to simulate? Why do we see the same genres of games over and over: fighting, racing, war, sports, and so on? Of course, economic and business concerns greatly influence game content. But is there something else, something deeper about the underlying structure of games that determines the kinds of processes they can and cannot depict?

Games are contests of power: they are systems of conflict. The key to comprehending the form of conflict simulated by a game is to figure out what is being contested.

In what kind of arena is the conflict being held?

Over what is the conflict being waged?

How is the progress of the conflict measured?

34

K. Salen, E. Zimmerman, Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals, The MIT Press, 2003 Henry Eddington, Eric Addinall, and Fred Percival, A Handbook of Game Design (London: Kogan Page Limited, 1982), p. 10.

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What aspects of the conflict are dynamically represented?

In order to answer these questions we distill the range of game conflict into three general categories: 1.

Territorial conflict

Board games such as Chess, in which pieces are moved on a limited playing field, are a common game of this sort.

2.

Economic conflict

Within simulations of economic conflict, it is not terrain that is contested, but a unit of value. The word "economic" does not necessarily refer to money, but to any collection of pieces, parts, points, cards, or other items that form a system through which the conflict takes place.

3.

Conflict over knowledge

Conflict over knowledge offers a different model for understanding the way games simulate conflict. In a game of conflict over knowledge, the outcome of a game action is dependent on whether or not the player knows the right answer to a question of some kind.

Design examples 1. Conflict over additive – substractive spaces Gamespaces are often based on mechanics of movement through negative space, using positive elements as ledges or supports for a player’s journey.

These illustrations show ways that figure-ground relationships can be utilized in many gamespaces, implying that spatial relationships can be an effective way of relaying spatial messages to players.

2. Conflict over path - destination Defining a specific spatial condition of a game environment, serves as an important model for how game worlds can be structured: linearly, branching, or interconnected.

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Labyrinth

Maze

Labyrinths are an important model for understanding gamespaces that are navigated in a linear fashion.

Mazes are multicursal, having more than one defined path.

Rhizome Spatially, the term rhizome can apply to any place that can be instantly traveled to from any other place.

3. Conflict over spatial size 1.

Narrow size

Narrow spaces create tension by giving space scarcity, limited amounts such that space itself becomes a valuable resource. Under this model, conflict can rise from players’ drive to keep space for themselves from other players or non-player characters.

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Diagram of a typical hallway space in Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion. The narrow hallways create a claustrophobic environment. This causes enemy encounters to be a significant threat, as the player is less able to move around them.

2.

Narrow spaces in Metal Gear Solid games offer concealment from enemies, but at the cost of both mobility and visibility.

Intimate Space

Intimate spaces are ones where everything within the space is accessible by the player character with its inherent abilities.

This sectional diagram shows multiplayer shooter characters battling within an intimate space arena.

Architectural features like ramps, slight elevation changes, and occasional barriers do not interrupt the spatially even playing field of the level.

Intimate spaces in Batman: Arkham Asylum involve the use of vantage points and sight lines that are accessible through the abilities of the player character, Batman

Contrasting narrow and intimate spaces creates interesting gameplay situations and allows players to build strategies of how to proceed.

3.

Prospect Space

Prospects are found in any area where one player may take a spatial advantage over another, such as by having a vantage point from above. In single-player games, prospects are used as boss rooms: large open spaces where the player cannot use his or her abilities to take a spatial advantage but must instead fight a single powerful foe.

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In Slender: The Eight Pages, the antagonist spawns randomly around the player, demonstrated in this plan diagram, giving the impression that he has complete control over the pitch-black prospect space.

If narrow spaces create a sense of claustrophobia, prospects create a sense of agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder that includes a fear of wide-open spaces.

4. Conflict over space occupants One key difference between gamespaces and real architecture is that enemies, not just allies, can also inhabit gamespaces. Where friendly NPCs may simply block a space until the player helps them, enemies block spaces by threatening to damage the player. As the player cannot directly pass through enemies without risking damage, game enemies can be seen as alternative architecture.

Enemies may be used to herd players where designers want them to go. For this to work, a large number of difficult-to-kill enemies should be used.

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Clickers in The Last of Us are first encountered in an area where they can be observed but easily avoided, and their distinct sound can be heard.

5. Survival conflict

In games where the game state can change depending on the player’samount of resources, level design can be used to create the opportunity for dramatic moments.

In games where players must manage their survival resources, level design can take on a much less linear form if the designer creates opportunities for players to risk losing health so they may explore for powerful rewards.

6. Conflict between prospect and refugee spaces

Refuge spaces provide protection from external dangers and a place from which to plan how to move forward.

Secondary refuges are protective spaces seen at a distance from refuges and across prospect spaces. Alternations between refuge, prospect, and secondary refuge spaces can create interesting gameplay scenarios.

Borrowing from D.M. Woodcock36, Primary prospects and refuges are those we are immediately engaged in: the refuge we currently occupy and the prospect we are looking out onto from our refuge. Secondary refuges and prospects are those in the distance⎯the refuge on the other side of the primary prospect, and the prospect beyond that. These spaces can create exciting gameplay scenarios when used in proper sequence: running from cover point to cover point in a shooting game, moving from one hiding spot to another in a stealth game, and many others.

36

Woodcock, D.M. Functionalist Approach to Environmental Preference. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1982.

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A plan diagram of a level from Metal Gear Solid showing prospect and refuge spaces.

This plan diagram of the courtyard from The Nightmare Over Innsmouth shows enemy paths and refuges.

7. Conflict between light and dark Light Architect Christopher Alexander, advocates for lighting conditions as a device for pulling occupants through space. In A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction 37, Alexander describes how light may be used at junctions where the designer would like to lead occupants.

Shade As Hildebrand points out, incomplete visual information entices humans to explore and complete their knowledge of what they see.38

37

Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 645–646.

38 Hildebrand, Grant. Origins of Architectural Pleasure. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 51.

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Carlos Scarpa’s Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, Italy (1972– 1975), features openings between adjacent gallery spaces that entice both through rhythm and the obscuring of what is to the right and left of each portal.

Zelda games often use a combination of shade and prospect spaces to create ambiguous dungeon environments: is the player about to receive an important item or be attacked?

Shadows Shadows fulfill Hildebrand’s aforementioned description of the lighting within refuge spaces. They obscure those within from view and allow them to have a strategic advantage over opponents.

As pointed out by Valve artist Randy Lundeen39, shadows can also be used to create linear elements on surfaces parallel to the player’s line of sight that pull the player toward their endpoint.

Due to perspective distortion, lines such as those created by the shadows of structural elements will converge on a vanishing point. Used horizontally, this can create a dramatic sign for players to move certain directions in games.

Shadowspace is when shadows are used to create the perception of separate spaces by changing the lighting conditions within a single space. The term itself was coined by the developers of Splinter Cell.

5.5.6 Implementing new representations Combining narrative and simulation is a powerful way of thinking about games as a representational medium, because it forces a truly experiential approach to participating with a story. The steadily increasing power of computer technology to simulate and manage complex systems has opened up new possibilities for game design in the digital realm. Incredibly detailed simulations of light, sound, physics, agent behavior, and other phenomena are becoming commonplace within games.

The fact that rich meanings can emerge from a representational context not based on software complexities offers an important insight into game design and simulation. Although there 39

Half-Life 2. Valve Corporation (developer and publisher), November 16, 2004. PC game.

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are important historical reasons for the prevalence of military and economic conflict in games, other forms of conflict, such as social, cultural, or emotional conflict, can and should be represented as well. According to the executive, on that day, games would become a mature and sophisticated form of cultural production. Clearly, media such as literature, theater, and comics have been capable of sophisticated representation for centuries without relying on high-resolution animation.

Game designers need to cultivate a deeper understanding of the form in which they work.

This is especially true in considering games as simulations. More than just choosing a representational design strategy, there is a complex interplay between a simulation and its simulated subject.

Understanding immersion and the player’s individuality All forms of entertainment strive to create suspension of disbelief, a state in which the player's mind forgets that it is being subjected to entertainment and instead accepts what it perceives as reality.

— François Dominic Laramée, "Immersion" Although the immersive fallacy has taken hold in many fields, it is particularly prevalent in the digital game industry. Common within the discourse of the immersive fallacy is the idea that entertainment technology is inevitably leading to the development of more and more powerful systems of simulation.

The willing suspension of disbelief, is the fundamental key to realize the player’s relationship both with the game and the real world. Designers need to understand how the player relates to a character in a game and how can this relationship be understood in terms of the "reality" of the represented world.

The double-consciousness of play The psychologist Gary Alan Fine, in his book Shared Fantasies40, offers a model for understanding the complex relationship between player and character. Borrowing from psychologist Erving Goffman's theories of Frame Analysis, Fine identifies three "levels of meaning" within which the player/character game experience takes place: 1. First, gaming, like all activity, is grounded in the "primary framework," the commonsense understandings that people have of the real world. This is action without laminations. It is a framework that does not depend on other frameworks but on the ultimate reality of events.

2. Second, players must deal with the game context; they are players whose actions are governed by a complicated set of rules and constraints. They manipulate their characters, having knowledge of the structure of the game, and having approximately the same knowledge that other players have.

3. Finally, this gaming world is keyed in that the players not only manipulate characters; they are characters. The character identity is separate from the player identity.

This three-fold framing of player consciousness—as a character in a simulated world, as a player in a game, and as a person in a larger social setting—elegantly sketches out the experience of play. The player and character frames both take place within the magic circle, whereas the person frame gains its primary meaning from the cultural context outside the immediate space of play.

40

Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 186.

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Fine's three-layer model is an extension of the double-consciousness of play. Players always know that they are playing, and in that knowledge are free to move among the roles of person, player, and character. Players of a game freely embrace the flexibility of this movement, coming in and out of moments of immersion, breaking the player and character frames, yet all the while maintaining the magic circle. This double-consciousness is what makes character-based game play such a rich and multi-layered experience.

In any game, players move constantly between cognitive frames, shifting from a deep immersion with the game's representation to a deep engagement with the game's strategic mechanisms to an acknowledgement of the space outside the magic circle. The many-layered state of mind that occurs during play is responsible for some of the unique pleasures that emerge from a game.

What if game designers focused their efforts on actively playing with the doubleconsciousness of play, rather than pining for immersion? Imagine the kinds of games that could result: games that encourage players to constantly shift the frame of the game, questioning what is inside or outside the game; games that play with the lamination between player and character, pushing and pulling against the connection through inventive forms of narrative play; games that emphasize metagaming, or that connect the magic circle so closely with external contexts that the game appears synchronous with everyday life. Innovation is only bound by a failure to see the fundamental principles of play.

Questions remain: What can games represent?

How can games engage players through meaningful play?

How can games challenge, critique, and contribute to the world outside the magic circle?

The goal of this research is to introduce a new kind of conflict that comes out of the Fine’s threefold model: The conflict between the person-player-character, and the consequence/critiques it has both for the game and the real world. In the following pages, I will provide the conditions and depict this conflict spatially, in order to better analyze a player’s behavior and enable each individual to discover his/her own “truth”.

“People are not looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are.

They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be."

- Dr. Robert Ford, Westworld series

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ΧΕΔΙΑΣΜΟ ΤΩΝ ΒΙΝΤΕΟΠΑΙΧΝΙΔΙΩΝ

6. IMPLEMENTING GAME THEORY INTO GAME DESIGN

06 IMPLEMENTING GAME THEORY INTO GAME DESIGN

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Game theory is a multiplayer decision theory where the choices of each player affect the payoffs to other players, and the players take this into account in their choice behavior.

Behavioral game theory aims at understanding the behavior of individuals when engaged in strategic interaction, and for this reason, has been widely used over the past years in the economical field.

6.1 Problem statement The various behavioral disciplines (economics, psychology, sociology, politics, anthropology, and biology) have long been based on distinct principles and relied on distinct types of data. There does not yet exist a unitary model underlying the psychological understanding of judgment and decision making, doubtless because the mental processes involved are so varied and complex. What game theory can provide, however, is a unified analytical framework available to all the behavioral disciplines.

Consequently, regarding that videogames provide the ground for all the above disciplines to be applied and analyzed in a player’s decision making, there has yet to be a thorough research about how they are all interconnected and influencing the player’s behavior both in and out of the game. I believe that a serious attempt could be made in studying the player’s behavior by implementing game theory concepts into game design.

For this research purposes, game design could investigate how individuals pursuing their own interests will act, followed by an analysis of what effects this will have for the system (the game) as a whole.

The conflict that arises, is regarding the priorities each individual sets while he/she is playing. Will he/she make choices:  as a character that needs to fulfill a certain story following a certain role,  as a player that focuses more on a personal strategy regardless the role, or  as a person drawing analogies to what he/she would have done in real life situations?

6.2 Understanding how game theory works – putting social conflict into play Game theory is divided between two branches; "non-cooperative" and "cooperative."

These two sub-fields represent not only two different research approaches but also, to a certain extent, different social orientations.

The first approach, the non-cooperative one, is descriptive. It seeks to predict how rational and self-interested individuals will behave in situations of conflict. The second approach, the cooperative one, seeks to recommend reasonable and fair solutions for conflict situations between rational and self-interested individuals. The first approach aims at revealing the reality of social conflicts; the second seeks to change it. Finally, the non-cooperative approach believes that conflicts are resolved by themselves, for better or for worse, through the sovereign decisions of the parties involved. The cooperative approach assumes the presence of a third party who can implement a fair and unbiased resolution for the conflict.

Game theory, in its two branches, can also be viewed as the theory of putting oneself in someone else's shoes. To manage a conflict or to resolve it you have to understand the motives of all the parties involved: you have to be able to assess the benefits that each party might gain and the costs that they will have to incur as a result of any possible action that they might choose to undertake. In many economic applications, when the parties to the conflict are corporations, these costs and benefits are concrete and measurable. But real life presents us with very different types of conflicts – eg, between friends, family members or colleagues, or between political parties, countries, even terror organisations. In these conflicts, costs and benefits become significantly more amorphous. They are affected by emotions, moral sentiments and ideologies.

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The potential for cooperation arises when each player can help the other. The dilemma arises when giving this help is costly. The opportunity for mutual gain from cooperation comes into play when the gains from the other's cooperation are larger than the costs of one's own cooperation. In that case mutual cooperation is preferred by both to mutual noncooperation (socalled defection). But getting what you prefer is not so easy. There are two reasons: 1. In the first place, you have to get the other player to help—even though the other player is better off in the short run by not helping.

2. In the second place, you are tempted to get whatever help you can without providing any costly help yourself.

We can just as well build models of honesty, promise keeping, regret, strong reciprocity, vindictiveness, status seeking, shame, guilt, and addiction as of choosing a bundle of consumption goods subject to a budget constraint.

(Gintis 1972a,b, 1974, 1975; Becker and Murphy 1988; Bowles and Gintis 1993; Becker 1996; Becker and Mulligan 1997).

6.3 Game Theory Tools Experiments subject individuals to a variety of game settings including diverse payoffs, informational conditions, and constraints on action, and deduce their underlying preferences from their behavior. Game theory provides the conceptual and procedural tools for studying social interaction, including: 1. the characteristics of the players, 2. the informational structure, 3. the rules of the game, 4. and the payoffs associated with particular strategic interactions.

1. Characteristics of players 1.

Strong Reciprocators

2. Inequality Averse

Strong reciprocators come to a social dilemma with a propensity to cooperate (altruistic cooperation), respond to cooperative behavior by maintaining or increasing their level of cooperation, and respond to non-cooperative behavior by punishing the “offenders,� even at a cost to themselves and even when they cannot reasonably expect future personal gains to flow therefrom (altruistic punishment). When other forms of punishment are not available, the strong reciprocator responds to defection with defection.

He is a conditional cooperator whose penchant for reciprocity can be elicited under circumstances in which self-regard would dictate otherwise.

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The inequality-averse individual is willing to reduce his own payoff to increase the degree of equality in the group (whence widespread support for charity and social welfare programs). But he is especially displeased when placed on the losing side of an unequal relationship. An inequality-averse individual generally exhibits a weak urge to reduce inequality when he is the beneficiary and a strong urge to reduce inequality when he is the victim (Loewenstein, Thompson, and Bazerman 1989).

Differences: Inequality aversion differs from strong reciprocity in that the inequality-averse individual cares only about the distribution of final payoffs and not at all about the role of other players in bringing about this distribution.

The strong reciprocator, by contrast, does not begrudge others their payoffs but is sensitive to how fairly he is treated by others.

Questions raised concerning the characteristics of players:  How many of the interpersonal relations are guided by empathy and how many by selfregard?  Can a videogame re-inforce the importance and develop more intensely non selfregarding values?  What percentage of players acts with strong reciprocity and how many are inequality averse?

2.

Informational structure

Perfect Signal We say a signal is public if all players receive the same signal.

We say the signal is perfect if it accurately reports the player’s action.

Imperfect Signal We say a signal is imperfect if it sometimes mis-reports a player’s action. An imperfect public signal reports the same information to all players, but it is at times inaccurate.

Private Signal If different players receive different signals, or some receive no signal at all, we say the signal is private. The case of private signals has proved much more daunting than that of public signals, but folk theorems for private but near-public signals have been developed by several game theorists.

Putting social norms into play – Player versus person When a group consists of more than two individuals and the signal indicating how well a player is performing his part is imperfect and private (i.e., players receive imperfectly correlated signals about another player’s behavior), the efficiency of cooperation may be quite low.

The socio- psychology of norms can is what provides the mechanisms that induce individuals to play their assigned parts. A social norm suggests that players may have a general predilection for honesty that allows them to consolidate their private signals concerning another player’s behavior into a public signal that can be the basis for coordinated collective punishment

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and reward, and players may have a personal normative predisposition towards following the social roles assigned to them.

3. Payoffs and rewards In level design, there are some spaces during gameplay that function as reward spaces to assist the player reaching the goal of the game. These form the following types: -

Reward Vaults

These spaces contain items, information, and other resources that constitute gameplay reward types.

-

Rewarding Vistas

An important but often overlooked reward in gamespaces is rewarding vistas, or impressive views of scenery. They are important for pacing purposes, providing a moment of catharsis after areas of high-action gameplay, or serve as a celebration of spatial achievement such as climbing high structures.

-

Meditative Space

These spaces offer neither rewarding views nor resources, but break up gameplay so players may mentally recover from the puzzle they just completed and prepare for the puzzle to come.

-

Narrative Stages

The reward of narrative exposition, the portion of a story that describes background information to viewers.

-

Sound rewards

Environmental sound effects can give feedback for direct interactivity or alert players that they are affecting something elsewhere in the level.

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Making rewards exciting through denial spaces These denial spaces entice exploration by making players aware of rewards and encourage curiosity by providing incomplete information.

-

Zen Views

As spatial orientations for affecting a user or player’s experience within a space, denial is based on controlling a player’s line of sight to or awareness of reward spaces. The first comes from an entry in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, the Zen view.

Alexander’s tale of the courtyard window describes the Zen view as a deliberate and fleeting experience of a spatial reward experienced when traveling to a destination

Zen views in games function in different ways: rewarding vistas and narrative spaces are often hinted at through actual Zen views. While reward vaults can be shown to players, the path to the reward is obscured.'

Obtuse angles can be utilized in games to partially reveal rewards, enemy encounters, or other important events. They can hint at or warn of things to come, or elicit exploration by offering players ambiguous information. This creates a sense of risk: what is around the wide corner may be a reward or may be something dangerous. The result is an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally evocative gamespace design.

The theme of progressing through layers is common in video game dungeon design such as that found in many role-playing or action games. In ,18 player character Kratos must penetrate several layers of a temple to find Pandora’s box. Likewise, many games with dungeons utilize the theme of descending—moving downward through floors to the destination of the level.

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-

Layered walls

One useful method that both hints at what occurs in other spaces and utilizes the concept of denial through layers is layered walls. Rather than creating solid barriers to distinguish one space from another, spaces can be divided with structures that allow the spaces to interact with each other: doorways, windows, trellises, and screens.

Twilight Princess has a room where players must progress by flipping a switch several times to reorient the layered walls in the room between two arrangements. Each wall layer has an opening through which Link may shoot arrows at the switch. While providing a method for the player to progress through the puzzle, the voids in the wall also reveal the player’s destination. As the player deals with enemies and collects treasure in the room, the view of the end goal keeps players on task.

-

Oku

As described by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, is a spatial layout in which the streets, alleyways, and other spaces wind around one another like the layers of an onion. These layers conceal small sitting areas, squares, and gathering spaces that can only be found as someone explores the winding pathways.

Spaces laid out according to the principles of oku have winding layers of walkways that conceal but hint at places for gathering and rest. Oku spaces utilize many different types of denial to create a powerful sense of curiosity.

In many ways, oku is an amalgamation of all of the previously discussed denial spaces: it offers Zen views of other layers of the city through layered walls of urban fabric, features non-90degree corners that goad explorers, and denies reward spaces with layers of winding passages.

Oku also shows the power of labyrinths and mazes—the ability not only to be tour puzzles, but also to communicate with players through selective revealing of information.

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4. Game rules – Game Theory models From an individual's point of view, the object is to score as well as possible over a series of interactions with another player who is also trying to score well. In each game, the player has a short-run incentive to defect, but can do better in the long run by developing a pattern of mutual cooperation with the other.

In the following models there are various situations introduced with a diversity of payoffs that are only demonstrative and are always subject to change. They types of payoffs can be anything from point or coins in a game, to information, and generally anything that might be considered as a reward during gameplay.

During the following examples, we categorize the models into three kinds of games: 1. Simultaneous games 2. Sequential games 3. Move games Simultaneous games are the ones in which the move of two players (the strategy adopted by two players) is simultaneous. In simultaneous move, players do not have knowledge about the move of other players. On the contrary, sequential games are the one in which players are or become aware about the moves of players who have already adopted a strategy. Move games are the ones in which the players take alternate turns to make their choices.

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SIMULTANEOUS

PRISONER’S DILEMMA

GAMES

RULES

The Prisoner's Dilemma is simply an abstract formulation of some very common and very interesting situations in which what is best for each person individually leads to mutual defection, whereas everyone would have been better off with mutual cooperation.

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Mutual cooperation

CASE 2: Mutual defection

CASE 3: Defection + cooperation

MAP DIAGRAM

Of course, the abstract formulation of the problem of cooperation as a Prisoner's Dilemma puts aside many vital features that make any actual interaction unique.

Examples of what is left out by this formal abstraction include the possibility of verbal communication, the direct influence of third parties, the problems of implementing a choice, and the uncertainty about what the other player actually did on the preceding move.

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SIMULTANEOUS

CONDITIONAL ALTRUISTIC COOPERATION Player 1 and Player 2 have to make a choice of whether to cooperate or not. If they cooperate they share rewards, if both defect they get nothing, and if one cooperates and the other defects, the defector gets everything. The difference with the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that both players have optical view of each other, so they can see if the other player will choose to cooperate or defect first.

GAMES

RULES

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Mutual cooperation Actual experiments ( Kiyonari, Tanida and Yamagishi (2000) ) have shown that when subjects participating in the Prisoner’s Dilemma were told that the other subject had already cooperated, 62% of the participants chose to cooperate too, in contrast of only 38% when the decision was simultaneous for both players. In addition when these subjects were told that they were the first to make the decision but this decision will be made known to the other player, cooperation was chosen by 59%.

CASE 2: Mutual defection

CASE 3: Defection + cooperation

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MAP DIAGRAM

SIMULTANEOUS

BIG MONKEY – LITTLE MONKEY

GAMES

RULES

Two players want to access a space with mutual but unequal benefits for both. However only Player 2 can enable access without any personal cost. For this particular setting, we will assign a cost of -3 for Player 1 to access the space.

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Player 1 takes action

CASE 2: No player takes action

CASE 3: Player 2 takes action

MAP DIAGRAM

Player 1 decides to act at a cost of -3, resulting to both Players having equal gains. This means that the players have acted with inequality aversion, achieving a more “fair” solution for Player 2.

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Player 2 decides to act first enabling access for both of the players since he can do it without any personal cost. This kind of reaction corresponds with the strong reciprocity type, which doesn’t begrudge other player’s payoffs when these are anequal.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES

SIMULTANEOUS GAMES

Two players want to access a space together for the purposes of the game’s narrative.

However Player 1 has greater gain from option A, while Player 2 has greater gain from option B, but both have greater gains if they stay together.

RULES

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Players take option A

CASE 2: Players take different options

CASE 3: Players take option B

MAP DIAGRAM

Each space outcome can result in different narrative scenarios, enforcing the concept of emergent narrative play.

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SIMULTANEOUS

DARK SIDE OF COOPERATION

GAMES

RULES

All players are to proceed to a reward room. However, they are offered a chance to punish another player in a case of mutual agreement, prohibiting his/her entrance. This is a chance where previous unfair attitudes can be punished thus enforcing better cooperation and fairness among players.

CASE 1: All players cooperate

CASE 2: One player is punished

MAP DIAGRAM

Prohibiting a player from sharing a reward can result in interesting narrative consequences. If the reward comes in the form of information for example, it could mean that the expelled player misses the chance of making an otherwise critical use of the findings, that would result in an alteration of the game story.

Person vs player vs character: There could exist a situation where all players could have perfect knowledge that the person that they would like expelled could make an enormous impact on the story and their personal gains, if granted access to the reward. This is a situation were the willingness to punish previous unfair behavior (which is the willingness of the “person” identity), comes in contradiction with the willingness to proceed in the story (the willingness of the “character” identity) and the willingness to gain more from the particular person’s eventual contribution to everyone (the willingness of the “player” identity).

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COMMITMENT PROBLEMS

SIMULTANEOUS GAMES

Two players need to make a choice between options A or B that will result in different unequal rewards for each player. There is also a third option ( C ) that could be enabled if both players wait for Player 3 to arrive.

RULES

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Players choose option A

CASE 2: Players choose option B

CASE 3: Players choose option C

MAP DIAGRAM

Player 3 could be a factor for the other two players to see if his arrival is desired or not affecting the relationships of one another and revealing new information. The outcome choice could be based on character preferences (how much the arrival of Player 3 will affect the character’s story), on player’s preferences (whether or not the arrival of Player 3 is a more desirable outcome in the distribution of payoffs), and on person’s preferences (whether or not it is preferable to continue or not with the third player together, with concerns towards empathy or “punishment” for previous behaviors).

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SIMULTANEOUS

HAWK - DOVE GAME

GAMES

RULES

Consider 2 players that fight over valuable territory. There are two possible strategies: 1. The hawk (H) strategy is to escalate battle until injured (C) or your opponent retreats.

2. The dove (D) strategy is to display hostility but retreat before sustaining injury if your opponent escalates.

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Both players choose the Dove strategy

CASE 2: Both players choose the Hawk strategy

CASE 3: Hawk + Dove strategy

MAP DIAGRAM

This case will result to both players paying a cost, and only one player (randomly chosen) to enter the area and take half the reward.

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The player who played Hawk gets all the reward, while the Player who chose the dove strategy gets nothing.

STRONG RECIPROCITY

SIMULTANEOUS GAMES

Strong reciprocity is an area of research in behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary anthropology on the predisposition to cooperate even when there is no apparent benefit in doing so.

In this particular model the reward for Player 1 is completely useless, and only functions as a reward for Player 2. Since Player 1 does not take anything from it, he must choose whether he will carry nonetheless the reward for Player 2 or simply ignore it.

RULES

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Player 2 gets the whole reward

CASE 2: Player 2 gets a portion of the reward

CASE 3: Player 2 gets nothing

MAP DIAGRAM

The importance of this setting is that Player 2 has no information of what Player 1 did encounter nor how he chose to act. However the information can always be subject to change, leading to even more interesting scenarios.(For example, Player 2 could be made able to see what Player 1 is doing, without the latter being aware of it).

A variety of studies from experimental economics provide evidence for strong reciprocity, either by demonstrating people's willingness to cooperate with others, or by demonstrating their willingness to take costs on themselves to punish those who do not.

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SEQUENTIAL GAMES

RULES

STAG HUNT / ASSURANCE GAME / COORDINATION GAME Stag hunt is a game that describes a conflict between safety and social cooperation.

In this sequential game, Player 1 gets to choose a strategy first, with Player 2 following. If both Players enter the same space, they share the rewards.

However if they choose different options, only the Player in option A gets all the reward, while the player on option B gets nothing.

Choosing either option can be a matter of strategy of tricking the other player or of promoting cooperation. Again the reasons of choosing can be based on the role’s requirements, the player’s motives of maximizing payoffs, or the person’s behavior adopting attitudes from real life.

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Player 2 chooses option A

MAP

CASE 1: Player 1 chose option A

DIAGRAM

CASE 2: Player 1 chose option B

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CASE 2: Player 2 chooses option B

DICTATORS GAME

SEQUENTIAL GAMES

In the dictator game, the first player, "the dictator", determines how to split an endowment (such as a cash prize) between himself and the second player.

RULES

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Player 1 leaves everything to Player 2

CASE 2: Player 1 takes half of the endowment

CASE 3: Player 1 takes everything leaving nothing to Player 2

MAP DIAGRAM

Player 1 might choose to show a full cooperative behavior by leaving a fair portion to Player 2, so that Player 2 acknowledges that and will take it into consideration in future encounters or result in a complete self-regarding behavior that will maximize Player 1’s payoffs.

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MOVE

TRUST GAME

GAMES

RULES

Subjects are each given a certain endowment, say $10. Then Player 1 can transfer any number of dollars, from 0 to 10, Player 2. The amount transferred will be tripled and given to Player 2, who can then give any number of dollars back to Player 1 (this amount is not tripled).

If Player 1 transfers a lot, she is called “trusting,” and if Player 2 returns also a lot, he is called “trustworthy.”

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Mutual cooperation

CASE 2: Mutual defection

CASE 3: Defection + cooperation

MAP DIAGRAM

Mutual trust results in both players sharing the reward.

No player gains access to the reward.

The trusting player gets tricked resulting to his failure, why the other player enjoys the reward by himself.

All three outcomes will have a great effect on how the two players will interact with each other in future encounters.

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ULTIMATUM GAME

MOVE GAMES

Player 1 (the proposer) conditionally receives a sum of ie. money and proposes how to divide the sum between the proposer and the other player. Player 2 (the responder) chooses to either accept or reject this proposal. If the second player accepts, the money is split according to the proposal. If the second player rejects, neither player receives any money.

RULES

GRAPH DIAGRAM

CASE 1: Agreement

CASE 2: Rejection

MAP DIAGRAM

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7. CONCLUSIONS A variety of experiments over the past years has shown that most individuals care about reciprocity and fairness as well as personal gain (Gintis et al. 2005), value such character virtues as honesty for their own sake (Gneezy 2005), care about the esteem of others even when there can be no future reputational repercussions (Masclet et al. 2003), and take pleasure in punishing others who have hurt them (deQuervain et al. 2004). Moreover, as suggested by socialization theory, individuals have consistent values, based on their particular sociocultural situations, that they apply in the laboratory even in one-shot games under conditions of anonymity (Henrich et al.2004; Henrich et al. 2006).

The above results reveal an individual’s likely behavior when also confronting a situation in game that might or might not be subject to change, uniting multiple sciences that each constitutes to a different kind of “syntax”.

For example, in the three- fold model: 1. When referring to the individual as a person, we are referring to him as a unit of a larger social context who brings into gameplay outside norms and predispositions, thus drawing an immediate correlation with the field of sociology.

2. When referring to the individual as a player, we are referring to him as in a contesting manner where the primary objective is to apply the most effective strategy in order to win a game, thus drawing an immediate correlation with the field of economics.

3. Finally, when referring to the individual as a character, we are referring to the process of him/her projecting himself/herself on another avatar, thus bringing the previews identities into play in order to match the plot’s needs. For example, someone who is greedy in real life, but knows that applying this personality trait in gameplay could enable huge risks and potential loss in the game, might try to become more reserved in order to win.

The willing act of playing, together with the willing suspension of disbelief can effectively question and even change one’s attitude in a way that other linear mediums don’t.

Architectural design can become the ground of these multiple disciplines to test and analyze their data, attempting their unification through a spatial depiction of player behavior and choices. Various game theory models can be applied to game-space subjecting players into different game and architectural settings, experimenting with diverse payoffs, informational conditions and action constraints, and allow them to express their underlying preferences spatially.

Each interaction and strategy can result in a different selection of paths, and a different experience of the game environment. Consequently, each player will have a unique experience of the game, and will be able to repeat it multiple times with different results each time, experimenting with different strategies.

Developing a new language Each element of each field we have now analyzed constitutes a word that can be combined (what Jackobson calls metonymy) with other similar words, and all together form new kinds of readings (metaphor). In this research, we chose to combine different yet interrelated fields of study, from the system of narrative and the semiotics of language, to a subsequent deconstruction of game-space in new axes and the re-construction of it using game theoretical concepts. Apart from their combination we also selected their appropriate elements in order to “read” space as a discourse that can shape and depict the player’s behavior and preferences.

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Epilogue Concluding, this research has based its studies on the wider context of better understanding games as cultural artifacts, and highlighting the importance they make on influencing and even changing the players. Just like the humanities attempt to get to the bottom of human experience and expose their structures, procedural media like videogames, get to the heart of things by mounting arguments about the processes inherent in them.

Humanistic approaches to cultural artifacts could be seen to trace the procedural construction of human subjectivity – the interlocking logics, histories, and cultural influences recent and past that drive our perspectives on new challenges. The humanities help us understand what it means to be human, no matter the contingencies of profession, economics or current affairs.

As creators and players of videogames we must be conscious of the procedural claims we make, why we make them, and what kind of social fabric we hope to cultivate through the processes we unleash on our world. Videogames are not expressions of the machine, but rather expressions of being human. And the logic that drives our games make claims about who we are, how our world functions, and what we want it to become.

Nowadays, we know what constitutes a game; we know how they work, why they matter, and the kinds of experiences they are capable of producing. But we have barely tested the limits of what they have the potential to become.

The selection of implementing game theory into spatial design, was exactly because it enables these humanistic approaches to find a unifying “play-ground” that result to its three key uses: (1) Understand the world. For example, understanding why animals sometimes fight over territory and sometimes don’t.

(2) Respond to the world. For example, developing strategies to win money at poker.

(3) Change the world.

Often the world is the way it is because people are responding to the rules of a game.

Changing the game can change how they act.

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TERM INDEX -

Level Design Level design, environment design or game mapping is a discipline of game development involving creation of video game levels—locales, stages, or missions. This is commonly done using a level editor, a game development software designed for building levels; however, some games feature built-in level editing tools. Level design is both an artistic and technical process.

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Εnvironment Αrt It is responsible for the aesthetics of the environment providing the appropriate scenery that will support the game’s action. The environment artist (also known as an environment modeler) creates backgrounds and scenery for video games—anything from architectural elements like pyramids or arenas to chairs and plants.

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Μise-en-scene It is an expression used to describe the design aspect of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction. It is about the careful placement of every element in a scene in a certain way to convey meaning.

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Genius Loci It is about the notion that a place is a space which has a distinct character. Since ancient times the genius loci, or spirit of place, has been recognized as the concrete reality man has to face and come to terms with in his daily life.

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Semiotics Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign process (semiosis) and meaningful communication. Semiotics includes the study of signs and sign processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.

The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications. As different from linguistics, however, semiotics also studies nonlinguistic sign systems.

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Discourse Discourse (from Latin discursus, "running to and from") denotes written and spoken communications. Discourse is a conceptual generalization of conversation within each modality and context of communication. It is the totality of codified language (vocabulary) used in a given field of intellectual enquiry and of social practice, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, et cetera. In the work of Michel Foucault, and that of the social theoreticians he inspired: Discourse describes "an entity of sequences, of signs, in that they are enouncements (énoncés)", statements in conversation.

As discourse, an "enouncement" (statement) is not a unit of semiotic signs, but an abstract construct that allows the semiotic signs to assign meaning, and so communicate specific, repeatable communications to, between, and among objects, subjects, and statements.

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Disposition The organization and hierarchy of elements that have been invented to form a sentence.

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Elocution The right placement of the appropriate words and sentences to form a desired meaning.

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Enthymeme An enthymeme is a rhetorical syllogism (a three-part deductive argument) used in oratorical practice. Aristotle referred to the enthymeme as "the body of proof", "the strongest of rhetorical proofs...a kind of syllogism". He considered it to be one of two kinds of proof, the other of which was the paradeigma. The enthymeme, in syllogistic, or traditional, logic, name of a syllogistic argument that is incompletely stated.

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Procedural Rhetorics It is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct.

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Possibility space It refers to the sum of every possible act/outcome that the players can explore through an interactive environment such as videogames or interactive fiction.

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Distributional Units Narrative units that constitute to the function of a particular level of narrative.

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Ιntegrative Units Narrative units that have functional meaning only when they are associated with a different level in narrative.

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Denial Spaces Spaces that deny the observer/player the ability to see a visual stimulus/view at its totality, in order to sparkle interest for further exploration.

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Shadowspace Spaces without any light, that contribute to certain goals in the game (limited view, advantage for the hiding player who is not visible)

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Simulation Gap The “Simulation Gap” is the “gap between rule-based representation and player subjectivity”, and is a term introduced by Ian Bogost. The difference between the simulation’s “view” and the player’s subjective understanding of the “model” is the gap where rhetorical power in a game [or other artifacts] lies.

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Dis-construction When the structures that constitute a system are redefined.

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De-construction When the practices of any field, are broken apart from their usual conventions and are re-analyzed by integrating new axes.

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Further bibliography: - Τ. Fullerton, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008 - K. Schrier, D. Gibson, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play, Information Science Reference, Hershey, New York, 2010 - S. Rogers, Level Up: The Guide To Great Videogame Design, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2010 - Ian Bogost, The Rhetoric Of Videogames, Georgia Institut of Technology, School of Literature, Communication and Culture, 2008 - G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look Of How We Experience Intimate Spaces, Beacon Press Books, 1969 - J. Schell, The Art of Game Design, A Book of Lenses, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008 - H. Lefebvre, The Production Of Space, Blackwell Publications, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA, 1991 - Steffen P. Walz, Toward A Ludic Architecture: The Space Of Play And Games, ETC Press, 2010

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