Against Narrative - Cecile Alduy

[Michaël Samyn]

Brilliant blog posts about the excessive use of the narrative form to find meaning in our lives. Correlates very nicely with how some of use are trying to get away from plot-driven narrative in our videogames.
Against Narratives
Against Narratives II
Against Narratives III. Or a Certain Kind of Narrative

Some of the most fundamental of human experiences, to say nothing of the natural and cosmic worlds, are stripped down from their intensity, beauty, horror, and maybe their truth, when we try to make sense of them by forcing them into a narrative box.

[vladdamad]

Very interesting, but still not sure about how we are supposed to convey meaning in notgames without the use of narrative. I mean, it's down to the same problem, isn't it? It's either we give the person experiencing the notgame freedom of choice at the loss of meaning, or we tell a story and therefore restrict the freedom of the interacter. My thoughts are somewhat like what you expressed in Vanitas - having objects to display meaning. Create a world without as much freedom as possible, but have the things in the actual world conveying something that the author wants to get across.

[Michaël Samyn]

It depends a bit on how concrete this "meaning" is that you want to convey. At Tale of Tales, we never have a single message to tell, or an explicit story. It's always a multitude of things hopefully with a degree of openness for the player to add even more. Meaning is something the player gets out of the piece, not something we put in. But we do create the circumstances for this. And we consider that a very important authorial task.

Anyway, Cecile Alduy is not against narrative as such. She is perfectly happy with narrative in a novel or a movie. What she disapproves of is the inclination of turning our real lives into narratives because only then they seem meaningful. This may be caused by the fact that we're so used to conveying meaning in linear narratives, also in fiction. So the two are not entirely disconnected.

I think interactive, procedural media offer us a way to convey meaning in a non-narrative way. By creating situations, moments, places, in which a player can simply be. In the first article, about the brain halves, she makes the distinction between things that separate, like narratives, that are about "two", and things that are about "one", where everything is one, where we feel as one with the universe. She believe poetry is much more suitable (than novels e.g.) to achieve the latter in art. And I believe that realtime technology is poetic.

[Andrew Tremblay]

What stuck with me concerning this issue was something I heard Tom Waits say about what it took to make a good song. He said that they should be like Swiss Army knives, that they can be pulled out and used for multiple situations and contain multiple purposes depending on the person. He wasn't the first guy, of course, Marcel Duchamp had this idea earlier with his personal art coefficient.

Tying this over to interactive media is indeed a question of picking the right circumstances, but layering this over the complexity of guiding an interactive experience often causes an explosion of complexity in regards to getting your point across (independent of how abstract the idea or feeling is). Unless there little to no interest in conveying an exact idea, this is a problem. But then again, this has always been a problem.

I'm not discussing how to herd the minds of people who experience what you make, but selfish as it sounds I think we all have opinions and conclusions that we want people to also have. Or at least understand.

[Michaël Samyn]

I don't. I love this medium precisely because it allows me to make a statement without a single conclusion. Like the Swiss Army knife that you mention: it's up to the player whether they will cut into a tree or open a wine bottle with it. I really love that. I even feel it makes creation easier. Because you only have to do the first part of the work. The second part is done by the player.

My advice against the "explosion of complexity" would be to simply not try to force it. If sitting on a bench in the park makes you think about the fragility of life, don't make a game about the fragility of life, but make a game about sitting on a bench!