ARGs aren’t just for pirates

> go north

You can’t go that way.

> go east

You can’t go that way.

> go south

You can’t go that way.

> go west

You can’t go that way.

> go up

You can’t go that way.

> go down

You can’t go that way.

> die

It is forbidden to commit seppuku.

Narrative Architecture!!!

I guess in light of the emphasis on spatiality and narrative objects,
I want to look at the difference between games like Deus Ex  and BioShock.

Bioshock pretty much followed Jenkins prescription.  Narrative through some discrete moments,
but mostly through narrative objects and environmental navigation, all semi-optional but programmed in the architecture and geography of the tasks to be highly probably.
It’s almost like Will Wright’s emergent Sims narrative remapped entirely to geography — Though I can’t say much about it, because I haven’t played the Sims.
But every necessity of the protagonist was met at a particular PLACE, - health, weapons, targets - and therefore guided the player through a distributed geographical narrative.
Weirdly — I was bored by the game, in the same manner that I was bored by Half Life.  To some extent, it did feel like the narrative was actually happening APART from my agency.
Basically, I felt like I was on rails, even if it seemed distributed.

The gameplay in Deus Ex games was entirely about moving through spaces, as well.  The biggest difference, and the entire point of the series, was that there were about 1,000,000 ways to navigate from point a to point b in the game world, depending on your character, and about 1,000,000 different things you could decide to do in between, and any one of these paths would introduce you to its own intracies of the narrative. Narrative, again was distributed — but the sense of agency was more powerful.  It wasn’t that I passively decided to read a recording in Bioshock or appreciate at some nice torture models and textures and had the narrative broadcast to me, — It was that I met a problem in the world (proposed to me in dialogue), used my gameplaying skills to explore the solution space — which was not necessarily a geographical space, and then fixed something in the world — My gameplay was heavily involved in understanidng the depth of the narrative.    To make that clear by reiterating — Side quests are a powerful distribution of narrative, in that they propose to you a shallow sense of a narrative through dialogue or some start point — after which you explore what that narrative bit really means within the game world by seeing and then solving the problem — and you internalize and empathize with a narrative in a way that isn’t familiar to non interactive media. Geography again plays a part, but geography is not the architecture — It’ s not zork.  Here, the geography is just an incidental structure to make the possibilities in play  evident and findable.  But it is the play possibilities themselves, like in Katamari, like in GTA, the mini-situations of rule structure within the game world’s overarching rule structure that do the particular game bit to derive empathy with the narrative.

So I guess I’m arguing that Jenkins is wrong and misleading, and the ludologists are right. Rather than geographical architecture, games are about situational architecture.
Games can tell interactive stories by distributing, player-choosable, Situations that express a position within the overarching game rule structure.
Dialogue, geography, narrative objects play a part in this… but please, narrative need not to so quickly dismissed as some hybrid passive/active consumption of a background stratified against the gameplay…

Incidentally, though with very shallow game play rules, Facade is an exact illustration of this.

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