Читать книгу III Diálogo entre las ciencias, la filosofía y la teología. Volumen I - María Lacalle - Страница 10

THE NARRATIVE AS A MEANS TO MAKE

THE VIDEO GAME A PERSON-CENTERED LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Clara Fernández-Vara

New York University

Let’s begin by unpacking the two main issues of using games as a locus for learning – first understanding games as narrative, and second learning focused on the human condition.

The nature of narrative in videogames is still somewhat contentious. In my case, I resort to the term «narrative», in its width and ambiguity, rather than referring to it as «narratology», which is the study of narrative in general and across the media. «Narrative» gives us the room to talk about different aspects of what a story in a game may be. It can refer to the events that happened before the game starts; it can refer to the events that unfold as we play; or it can be how players retell their experience. This three-fold definition is based on Genette’s polysemic approach to the term narrative (Genett, 1980). The interactive nature of games makes it so that the story can be pre-determined or changed depending on the choices of the player, so stories also have a transformative nature. There are many kinds of stories and histories that can take place in and around videogames.

As a narrative designer and a scholar, I prefer to talk about worlds in which the activities and events of the game take place. Not all games take place in worlds or can be narrative – think of abstract puzzle games, for example. But in order for there to be a narrative, we need a world first, then from that we can make a game, or a film or write a novel.

In relation to games as learning locus to learn about the human condition, I find that games suffer from undue pressure to deliver positive change in ways that other media cannot. There are no expectations for film and television to only have educational purposes – while reading a book is supposed to be a symbol of learning and growth by default, playing videogames is regarded as frivolous or a waste of time. Although the prejudices about videogames are fading steadily over time, as they have become more and more normalized and part of everyday life, there is still a somewhat hostile attitude towards the discussion of games as a humanities subject outside the circles of game studies. As Marie-Laure Ryan argued (2003), the way immersive qualities of games and digital are thought to make their users not be able to distinguish fantasy from reality is the modern equivalent of how chivalry novels were supposed to have dried the brains of Don Quijote. Discussing the potential for positive influence of games on their players is the flipside of this attitude – believing that games can operate on people, who are «passive» and are modified by the influence of the media they engage with. But neither extreme is true – games do not change us, for good or bad, just through sheer exposure. How we engage with videogames and how they can transform us depends on our levels of literacy.

Literacy is where the potential of games as a way to understand human nature and as a space for learning lies. We can gauge how much games can change us by knowing how they work and how to play them, as well as what their expressive possibilities alongside their socio-cultural implications. Games use different strategies to interpellate different kinds of audiences – videogames are stereotypically thought of as an activity for teenage boys, but every year we have audience studies that prove the heterogeneity of videogame players and the different platforms they use. There are games geared towards women over 35 years old, educational games for children, games for seniors, to name but a few. All these have different presentations – the covers or download icons allow players to make assumptions about what they may play, as Jesper Juul argues in the context of casual games ( Juul, 2009). The design of the games themselves also makes assumptions about who is going to play them and what they know beforehand; some games lack tutorials or are hard to get into without having played a similar game before. For example, first-person shooter games often assume that players know the difference between moving in the space and moving the camera point of view, which becomes a barrier for many new players to the genre. Some groups of people, often self-identified as «hardcore gamers», are proud of making playing videogames all about having specific skills and hand-eye coordination, which can seem inaccessible to others. The focus on skills and supposedly hard-to-access knowledge makes some groups of male gamers feel that they belong to a special club «in the know», at times fostering exclusionary practices. But the truth is that everyone can play games, digital or non-digital. Play is pervasive in culture, and there are games for everyone, whatever their gender, ethnicity, socio-economic class or sexual orientation.

Games also reflect the beliefs and values of the people who make them (Flanagan and Nissenbaum, 2014)providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. \»Big ideas\» such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation -- as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed -- may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games. After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.»,»ISBN»:»978-0-262-32445-8»,»language»:»en»,»number-of-pages»:»222»,»publisher»:»MIT Press»,»source»:»Google Books»,»title»:»Values at Play in Digital Games»,»author»:[{«family»:»Flanagan»,»given»:»Mary»},{«family»:»Nissenbaum»,»given»:»Helen»}],»issued»:{«date-parts»:[[«2014»,7,25]]}}}],»schema»:»https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json»}, and part of their potential to make us understand the human condition through them is understanding how their worlds and their characters are reflecting those values. For example, a game like Overcooked (2016) has players working together to run a hectic kitchen, and players need to work together in order to complete each challenge, thus promoting values of collaboration and communication. A game which embodies values that may not be shared by a specific sector usually leads to controversies – for example, Resident Evil 5 (2009) was criticized for the way in which the enemy zombies were mostly dehumanized representations of black people. Making games while being unaware of how they transmit values not only leads to controversies, but also undermines the perception of games as artistic expression.

Game controversies usually derive from sectors of the population who recognize values or representations in them that they do not agree with or make them feel uncomfortable; this happens with people in all places of the ideological spectrum. Violence in games is a tired topic, now the controversies can come from representations of history, perpetuating gender stereotypes and objectifying women, or including same-sex relationships as part of the mechanics. One unfortunate defense from certain players as well as some game makers is to claim that games are «just entertainment», as a way to pretend they are a frivolous activity and negating the possibilities of games having social messages or being a cultural expression. Thing is, in order to understand the role of games, narrative or not, as an expression of the human condition, we need to acknowledge that they are significant, that they mean something to their players and makers, and that they embody ideas that we may agree with or not. When most of the enemies in a game have dark skin, the game is making a judgement value about who is the hero and who is disposable or undesirable. When Civilization III (2001) organizes religions as a property that indicates progress, polytheistic religions are less powerful than monotheistic ones, the game is making a value judgement about which religions and national groups are more powerful or deserving. Games express ideas through their representation as well as through the actions that they allow players to perform.

In the same way that there needs to be a general acknowledgement that games already make ideological statements through their design, game makers also need to acknowledge the richness and wide expressive possibilities of the medium they work in. Some game designers wonder what games would be like without using violence as a part of their mechanics, while the truth is that there are plenty of games where the player can interact, explore, discover, manage resources, play at make-believe, without needing to resort to violence. One just has to look beyond the stereotype to find puzzle games, city simulation games, racing games, or mystery games. The worldwide success of the game Candy Crush Saga (2012) derives from its accessibility, as a platform as well as how easy it is to learn to control it. Walking simulators such as Dear Esther (2012) allow players to navigate and explore spaces to figure out their story, to meditate and absorb their environment by appealing to their senses. There are plenty of examples that belie the stereotype of games just being software that is played on a console by young people to perform fantasy violence.

The recognition of the expressive and ideological possibilities of games therefore depends on being able to develop the literacy to understand how to access, play and decode them. Media literacy is a key skill in this day and age in general – its lack is what favors the spread of fake news; the appreciation for the arts, such as literature, film, comics, dance and games also depends on being able to understand its codes and conventions. The first barrier to game literacy is understanding how to interact with a game – people unfamiliar with games usually believe that one needs a certain degree of dexterity to play, as pointed out above. This belief is not unfounded, since most game controllers have more buttons than we have fingers in our hands. But it is not the only way to play videogames – computer games can resort to input devices that we use every day (mouse and keyboard) while the advent of touch screens in mobile phones and digital tablets means that the interfaces themselves are not quite a barrier anymore.

Once the accessibility and literacy barriers have been broken, all types of players can access games as fictional worlds – worlds that can be explored, that have a history, and where players can live their own stories. These worlds are not only part of fantasy or science fiction – we have actual cities that the player can traverse, from the London of Sherlock Holmes to modern San Francisco – hostile jungles, as in the Tomb Raider series, or the Swiss mountains of Over the Alps (2019). It is by becoming inhabitants of these worlds that we can start to understand other people, other ways of living, other ways of thinking. The ways in which digital games can transport us to new worlds are not necessarily escapist, but rather they provide us a safe space to understand people who are not like us. For example, This War of Mine (2014) puts the player in charge of a group of civilians during a war, and the goal is to survive a conflict in which they are trapped. Players become performers in a space of extreme loss, destruction and heartache, and have to deal with it, not just be mere spectators.

This War of Mine also exemplifies the importance of giving roles to players that are not just power fantasies – we learn the most when we have to make difficult decisions, when we see the consequences of our decisions. Meg Jayanth refers to games that empower the player and turn them into the center of the world as «entitlement simulators», and advocates for having more games where the player has limited agency and may not be able to change the world, but has to deal with it (Jayanth, 2016). Games like her own 80 Days (2014) put the player in the shoes of Passepartout, Phineas Fogg servant, who is the one who needs to plan and understand the locations they traverse; the world is littered with political upheavals but their role is to travel and deal with the obstacles, but they cannot really change the world. Papers, Please (2013) puts the player in the shoes of a border agent who decides who gets in or not; some people are escaping persecution in their country, others may be criminals but offer bribes, which may help the player keep their family alive. Papers, Please provides players with real dilemmas, rather than a Manichean view of the world.

Some games deliberately set up the player to never be able to win – Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12^th (2003) gives a view of a middle-Eastern town that the player can attack in order to kill terrorists. As the player attacks and destroys the city, the relatives and friends of the dead terrorists become terrorists themselves, while the game has no end. Similarly, The Snowfield (2011) turns the player into a soldier during the first World War; the soldier looks for shelter and warmth in the freezing cold, and maybe even company, but the destruction of war means there’s not a lot of room to avoid dying from hypothermia. Both games use the properties of digital games that allow players to identify and connect with the character they control, as well as understanding the conflicts that others have to endure.

Last but not least, I would like to defend the importance of the use of the so-called genre fiction as an expressive space to understand human nature. Although science fiction and fantasy settings are often considered escapist, unreal and «not serious», truth is that genre fiction provides us with a metaphorical space to understand the human condition. Horror stories are metaphors that allow us to face our worst fears – see for example how the housing crises of the late 2000s gave way to film titles such as Rec (2007), where a disease in an apartment building ends up in the massacre of its tenants and visitors. Science-fiction has been commenting on the human condition since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818). Games also have power to use genre fiction in similar insightful ways. For example, the game Planescape: Torment (1999) is set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, but its premise is to send the player in a quest to find the answer to the question «What can change the nature of a man?»

Games, both digital and non-digital, are cultural artefacts and artistic expressions that can help us understand ourselves and others. The only thing that is getting in the way of being perceived as such is how their makers often think of them as products supposedly devoid of ideas, instead of works that are expressive and engaged with human concerns, hopes and conflicts.

REFERENCES

Flanagan, M. and Nissenbaum, H. (2014). Values at Play in Digital Games. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.

Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press.

Jayanth, M. (2016). Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency for 80 Days and Beyond. Medium (blog). From https://medium.com/@betterthemask/forget-protagonists-writing-npcs-with-agency-for-80-days-and-beyond-703201a2309.

Juul, J. (2009). A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.

Ryan, M.-L. (2003). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore (MD): The Johns Hopkins University Press.