Is Bioshock a Narrative?

After last sessions presentation on the Ego-shooter Bioshock the question arose whether it is a narrative or not. The answer to the question was that it is a narrative that is presenting a linear story that the player can create. Furthermore, we established that there are two possible endings to the game namely a positive  and a negative one whereas the negative ending can be further split in a negative ending with a positive tone or with a negative connotation. Knowing these facts about the ending of the game I question myself whether one can play the game multiple times. Are there so many possibilities to create the narrative that it turns out differently each time even if there are only two possibilities for an ending? Or is it a game that starts to be boring after a while because of the narrative that is fixed and cannot be altered completely?

Gender and Video Games

It's quite poignant that we're tackling this topic this week, as I had just seen an interesting video dealing with girls and toys, aimed at adjusting the kinds of toys made for girls in an effort to promote the design and sale of toys that encourage young girls to be engineers, scientists and builders.

I found the article to lack scientific rigour, as some of my classmates have mentioned in their blog postings, with Loke's methods seeming somewhat haphazard, with what to me was far too small a sample size, a lack of standard questions, and not all the same information provided by the interviewees (some provided pictures, some didn't etc.). 

In terms of gender roles in the virtual space, I thought it focused much more on the blurring of real and virtual life than it did on an in depth study of gender in games and virtual spaces. Games such as Tomb Raider and Resident Evil could have been utilized to discuss the representation and depiction of women in games, as could The Sims and World of Warcraft which both skew a little closer to Second Life, and which were in wide release when this article was written. Dealing more with issues of addiction, self-esteem, the tendency to blur real and virtual lives, the article could have been more provoking if it had addressed how female characters have been, and are, portrayed, in virtual spaces such as games, if that has changed over the years and if there are movements or efforts to change these portrayals.

Female characters in video games are not new, Samus Aran, the protagonist of Metroid has been around since 1986, before most of the people in the class were even born, but as graphics and technology has developed that allowed us to create more realistic and visual games, did the (seemingly) male dominated arena of video gaming create unrealistic and unrepresentative female characters? (if you take a look at the video below, you can see how Samus now looks similar to many other female characters, with the small waist, big breast, and very fit)

What have we (or I) learned from the seminar so far?

From discussing Marshall McLuhan, Post-Structuralist theory, remediation, video games and everything in between, this semester has been quite an enjoyable one thus far and precisely what I was hoping for when choosing the specialization for my Masters program, which is how I ended up in this course. Tackling new media in its various shapes and forms has been intriguing and further stimulated my interest in the area, which had been stoked many years ago in my BA days through classes in Semiotics and the history and theory of media.

I've enjoyed speaking about these various topics with my classmates and the instructor, and therefore found the discussion aspects of the course to be the most fulfilling. That could also be from the fact that I also find that those people who do not participate normally may participate more during these aspects of the class, although that is not always the case. Having read some of the other blogs, some of my fellow classmates have commented on the presentations or symposiums, and I would tend to agree that some of them did not provide a great deal of insight and were more of a rehashing of the article that had been assigned, or were rehashing the film or television series being covered, and providing no clear link to the theories or article. It has improved as the semester has progressed, and the additional time for Stefan to engage the class was a positive step.

In a way, I wish that this class required certain prerequisites or a particular semester/level of student, so that Stefan could delve even deeper into certain topics, and presume certain skills/knowledge in terms of writing, presentation skills etc. I feel that would allow much more interactivity and thought provoking, deep, intellectual discussions amongst the class, allowing all students to get even more out of each session, but understand that classes here don't seem to be offered with those restrictions. I've learned a great deal, and look forward to tying it all together in the upcoming weeks.

What have we learned from the seminar so far?

The seminar, so far, was an interesting journey, starting with Marshall McLuhan’s definition of what he considered New Media in his time up until the question of what we currently see as contemporary forms of media, be it remediated versions of older media, such as digital paintings in contrary to classical paintings with pen and paper, or completely new forms of media (and here I can’t even think of anything which is not, at least in some way, only remediation, but something completely new; maybe someone can help me out here. Do we even have something really new? Have we reached our limits already? I hope not…). When we continued talking about the New New Medium on the basis of images, movies and videos, we were questioning our perception of reality: in this highly manipulative world of media things can no longer be guaranteed as visual truth. What is reality? Who defines the truth? Taking a closer look at the example of video games, we see that this form of new media combines various kinds of media and creates something new. We came to the conclusion that video games have emerged into a whole new culture, which is not limited to being one form of new media, but remediates various kinds of media, be it music, movies or traditional arts.

The symposiums were dealing with really interesting questions and conveyed some intriguing approaches to trying to explain the different forms of New Media and how we perceive them; I am looking forward to the remaining sessions.

Video Games as Narratives

I think we all can agree that video games are a form of narratives in one way or another. Still, there are clear distinctions between how a book or a movie is narrated in comparison to a video game. Every kind of game (we don’t even have to restrict this to video games only) is telling a story – a story every player has to identify and understand for himself, because he is part of the process of creating this story and thus bring life to the underlying text. The amount of clear narration varies greatly in the field of (video) games: while some, such as Alan Wake or some of the Prince of Persia series, even offer a real narration by characters within the game in addition to the player’s own experiences, other games, like Minecraft or Tetris, hardly show any kind of story in the first place which makes the player the only – yet also necessary – narrator.

What have we learned from the seminar so far?

During the last weeks a number of different topics referring to new media have been covered and discussed. First of all, it is necessary to differentiate between old and new media. According to McLuhan this means that new media is anything consisting or using computer chips. However, old media are for instance also the telephone or the printing press. These media were “updated” and became cellphones and fully digitalized copy machines. This process is called remediation.  Old media are influenced by new technology, borrow or adopt these technologies or only parts of a particular technology and create a new medium. 

Analyzing specific new media, like movies or video games, one has to focus on different aspects and theories. In the analysis of movies, TV series, etc. one of the most discussed questions is the one of reality. Is the story or the presented world real and can the audience rely on what they see? This leads automatically to simulation and the concept of simulacra. Explaining simulacra on the example of the iPhone it means: there was one original iPhone once, but because of the huge number of iPhones all around the world we do not know which one is the original and consequently we do not know if our iPhone is the real iPhone. 

Focusing on video games the analysis of this medium is quite different. Whereas movies play with the question of reality, video games seem to have a great influence on other media. There, remediation works in both ways: video games can remediate media like movies, novels and smartphones whereas animated special effects, narrative structures or the development of technical equipment can also remediate video games. 

All these aspects discussed in our course so far show that new media is a very complex topic. It is more than just computerized technology or digitalization. It is more than just the Internet and the problem of information overload. It is a constantly changing process of media and we can analyze them in different ways and by focusing on different and interesting aspects.

Video Games and Narrative

 

There are two essential questions which are very hard to answer talking about video games and narrative. Talking about movies and books narrative is definitely text because the content is written down and (in the case of a movie) visualized. In a video game the player gets the possibility to “write” his/her own story. Of course, the possibilities a gamer can chose are created by those who created the game, but it is not a traditional narrative. Maybe, one could think the other way around: if a gamer writes down the story of his character and his adventures experienced in a game, than one gets a written story which is text (I hope this makes sense because I do not know how to describe my thought in a better way).

The question of the narrator does also seem to be quite difficult unlike books. The protagonist of a video game does not necessarily tell the story but “writes” the story by making decisions and actions. If he stops acting the story will not be continued and the game stops. With his decisions the protagonist influences the story as well as its ending. Nonetheless, sometimes there is an omnipresent narrator giving additional information in short cuts for instance. So, do video games possibly have more than one narrator? And are video games even texts? These two questions will hopefully be answered in the next session because today we could not find an answer.