The hierarchy of narratives

In the last post, I described "the game philosophy triangle" as a space in which we can define any game by reference to three basic components: entertainment, narrative, and hypernarrative. The first two are shared with many other media--Saturday Night Live, caricatures, and stand-up comedy are nearly entirely entertainment, while crime dramas, theater, symphonies, and most movies are narratives.

However, I believe games are the primary (if not the only major) instantiation of the third factor: hypernarratives. The prefix "hyper-" was not chosen arbitrarily; games have a parallel to the standard hierarchy of prefixes, as follows:

• Subnarratives: the various micromotives and the resulting decisions that drive individual scenes of a work
• Narratives: the story of the work, taken as a whole
• Supernarratives: the ideas that underlie and intersect the narrative, refining the context in which the narrative's message is set; the semiotic and conceptual framework within which a narrator is telling the story
  
• Hypernarratives: the framework, built separately from the narrative by the person to whom the story is being told, that fundamentally changes the nature of the narrative

In other words, hypernarratives : narratives :: hypercubes : cubes. They are the result of adding another dimension to the existing ones, orthogonal to all.

For instance, Ben from SLRC implemented a hypernarrative experiment in Far Cry 2 (h/t Clint Hocking), exploring the how the narrative is altered by literally changing the rules of the game.

Open-world games, in particular, are conducive to building hypernarratives. The quintessential example of such games is The Elder Scrolls series, especially the most recent two, wherein the so-called "main quest" can be completely ignored and dozens or hundreds of hours of play derived from entirely ancillary quests.

A final note: hypernarratives are not merely designed to make the game harder (c.f. the Nethack challenges). They are designed to add meaning, to enrich the narrative of the game with a narrative of one's own.


Next: Supernarratives and superheroes

The game philosophy triangle

A central challenge in establishing a philosophical foundation for game criticism is the delineation of a metric for their "art-worthiness." The vast majority of games are, after all, produced to be sold, and in some sense those games all contain components which are fun for purchasing's sake (unless the game is a movie tie-in, then the fun is often left out for cost reasons).

However, even a cursory analysis suggests that some games contain a richer contribution to the humanities than others. On the one end of the spectrum, we may place fully entertainment-centric games such as Bejeweled; on the other, the closest thing to a consensus is probably BioShock.

The nature of the continuum between the two (and, one hopes, extending a substantial distance beyond BioShock) makes a clear division between game types difficult or impossible. Yet the problems with this foundation run deeper: there is another axis, orthogonal to the first, that describes the level of narrative and structural control the designers exert over the players. The two titles mentioned above exemplify high levels of control; a game like Oblivion may serve as the mental signpost for the other end of that axis.

Thus, games may truly be categorized according to their position on a triangle defined by those points, and the idealized vertices of the triangle may be summarized thus:

• Entertainment: games that reference no external concepts, being abstract exercises in following a certain set of rules for the purpose of winning
• Narrative: games that tell a coherent story, guiding the player down a linear path from introduction to conclusion
• Hypernarrative: games that tell no unique story but instead instantiate a world inside of which the player can tell her own stories

Few games approach these ideals. A game without entertainment is hardly a game. Games without any narrative are typically multiplayer-only; without some form of "main quest," the lines become blurry between games and pure virtual worlds (like Second Life). Many (maybe most) games have very limited or nonexistent hypernarrative features, which is perhaps why external critics of the concept of games-as-art tend to see games as limited to the entertainment-narrative continuum.

This blog exists not to evaluate games' values along the entertainment axis but instead to analyze the intersection of the narrative and hypernarrative elements in games--and hopefully, by doing so, to develop a consistent foundation and vocabulary for the philosophical and literary analysis of games.


Next: defining hypernarratives