FICTION
Video Games and Fiction
It is plausible that video games contain elements of fiction. Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego, 2010) depicts the fiction of a man named John Marston, his search for the members of his old criminal gang, and his death at the hands of federal agents. Marston, the world in which he lives, and the events that take place around him are the type of depictions that would find a natural place in other fictive media such as cinema. But significantly, the gameplay of Red Dead Redemption also partakes in this fiction: the player spends his or her time hunting coyotes, searching for lost treasure, and fighting gun battles. These are not activities that the player really performs; rather it is fictional that s/he does these things.
A number of theorists have considered video games as fictive artifacts. Drawing heavily on critical theory, Barry Atkins’s More Than a Game (2003) conceives of “game-fictions” as a new kind of “text,” and conducts close readings of game-fictions such as SimCity (Maxis Software, 1989) and Half-Life (Valve, 1998). In Hamlet on the Holodeck Janet Murray, whose ultimate concern is wider than video games, considers the possibility of new types of fictional narrative inherent in interactive digital media (1997). Such accounts of video games as fictions have often been associated with so-called “narratology,” and though they acknowledge that games present fictions, writers such as Atkins and Murray often seem more interested in stories than fiction per se.
And yet, within games studies there has also been some resistance to the idea that video games are fictions, or at least doubts that these fictional elements, even if they exist, are all that important to the game. Indeed, there are different concepts that we can use to refer to the ostensibly fictional content of games: Marston and the world in which he lives might be referred to as virtual or simulated items. At least one theoretician has claimed that video games, and the items depicted within them, are virtual rather than fictional (Aarseth, 2007). Other writers, though agreeing that games do involve fictions, have been tempted to downplay the centrality of this fictional aspect, seeing fiction as of secondary importance relative to game mechanics and gameplay (Juul, 1998, 2005).
We can formalize this situation into a thesis and two challenges. The fictive thesis has it that video games are works of fiction or minimally that they contain fictive elements. The two challenges to this thesis are: first, that the apparent fictional elements in games have a non-fictive status, and second, that if there are fictive aspects of video games, they are typically unimportant, merely constituting the background, narrative, or flavor of a game, where the critical aspects of games are the gameplay and rules. This essay will answer both of these challenges in order to understand the genuine role of fiction in video games.
Game scholar Espen Aarseth has questioned the fictive status of the objects depicted in video games (2007). He argues that the elements depicted in video games have a different mode of being to those depicted in traditional fictions, concluding that the depictive elements in games “are ontologically different” to fiction (2007, p. 36). Aarseth’s paper calls attention to a number of differences between the depictive artifacts of fictions such as novels and films and those found in video games, and takes these differences to show that the latter are not fictions. Referring to a difference between the dragon Smaug in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and a dragon as represented in the video game EverQuest (Sony Online Entertainment, 1999), Aarseth notes that the former “is made solely of signs, the other of signs and a dynamic model” (2007, p. 37, emphasis in the original). The claimed difference between Smaug and the dragon in EverQuest is clearly in terms of their representational media: one is represented through propositions and pictures, and the other through these things and a dynamic 3-D model, and this difference is genuinely apparent.
Aarseth is also tempted to make an ontological distinction on the basis of this media difference, and claims that because of its dynamic model the EverQuest dragon makes possible a number of modes of engagement that Smaug does not: “simulations allow us to test their limits, comprehend causalities, establish strategies, and effect changes, in ways clearly denied by fictions, but quite like in reality” (2007, p. 37). Virtual objects “can typically be acted upon in ways that fictional content is not acted upon” (2007, p. 36, emphasis in original). Hence, the depictive elements in video games are virtual items or simulations, and not fictions.
I have argued elsewhere these facts do not establish that the objects or events seen in video games are not fictions (2009) and I will discuss some of the reasons for this later in this essay. But Aarseth’s claims do us an important service here: they make it clear that to address the challenge that video games are not fictions, and to explain the exact role that fiction takes in video games, we need to understand how, in the context of video games, fictions allow for the genuinely distinctive modes of interaction that he identifies.
Though he concludes that many games involve fictional elements, games scholar Jesper Juul has expressed doubts about the importance of fiction to games (1998). It should be noted that Juul has stepped back from these doubts, seeing fiction as having an important though partial role in games (2005). What is the basis of Juul’s initial doubts? He formulates the following argument:
1. Rules are what makes a game a game.
2. Fiction is incidental to whether something is a game.
3. A game can be interesting without fiction.
4. A game with an interesting fictional world can be a terrible game.
5. Therefore, fiction in games is unimportant.
(Juul, 2005, p. 13)
Two aspects of this argument can be teased apart, and as they are stated both are more like assertions than arguments and so are worth unpacking. Premises 3 and 4 seem designed to provide evidence for premise 2, and they are comprised of contingent claims that depend on the evaluation of how games actually do employ fictions. Many games clearly have uninteresting, trite, or asinine fictions; a good example of this would be Just Cause 2 (Avalanche Studios, 2010) where much of the fiction is unrealistic, juvenile, and clichéd (even though the gameplay is very good). Other games have interesting fictional worlds but are not even considered games by some; Myst (Cyan, 1993) being a traditional but contentious example of this. The claim, then, is that the separate evaluative fortunes of the fictive and gameplay aspects of video games show that these two elements are ontologically distinct, moreover (as claimed in premise 2) this shows that fiction is incidental to video games.
But neither evaluative observation shows that the fictive aspects of games are incidental to the games where it exists. That a video game might have an interesting world while being a poor game, or the opposite, merely shows that game designers do not infallibly produce good video games. In other evaluative kinds where the various aspects of the artifact can have differential success, the fact is not taken to have the ontological significance that Juul implies here. That a film has great cinematography and visuals while having an uninspiring narrative (James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is a candidate) is a contingent fact about the performances in that particular movie and does not have ontological implications for cinema itself. What this may display, however, is that the fiction and the game mechanics can be separately considered to the extent that the success or failure of each is an independent prospect.
The core of this argument resides in the substantive claims of premises 1 and 2. These premises are elaborated by various other remarks that Juul makes. For example, he notes that there is an asymmetry between the rules and fiction of a game in that “[t]hough rules can function independent of a fiction, fiction depends on rules” (2005, p. 121). According to this view the rules of a game have an ontological priority and are indeed constitutive of what a game is. This implies that the fiction of a game is mere clothing, unimportant to the identity of a given game or to its playing. In his earlier essay Juul went much further than this, claiming that the relationship between a game and its fiction is “arbitrary” (1998).
Juul’s later statements on the relationship between a game and its fiction, where he steps back from his skepticism, are admittedly sometimes vague, perhaps because he lacks the proper framework to explain the relationship between a game and its fiction. My later observations on game ontology in this essay will provide such a framework. I will argue that premises 1 and 2, when applied to video games, assume an outmoded ontology, and moreover are false. In almost all video games, fiction is critical to game identity and gameplay. Exacerbating the problem here is that Juul’s conceptualization of fiction is also indistinct, and he frequently gives the impression that he takes the fiction to be the world setting, or “narrative framing” of a game (1998). If true, this conception of game fiction might make the fiction seem eliminable or unimportant. Unfortunately, this characterization of the extent of fiction within video games is also false.
Video Games as Fiction
To really address the role of fiction in gaming, we need an understanding of the nature of fiction. Within philosophy there is an extensive literature on fiction, though it usually takes as its concern fiction in its traditional forms such as novels, films, and plays (Currie, 1990; Lamarque, 1996; Walton, 1990). Critical to most such accounts is that fictional works are comprised of depictions of events, people, and places with an imagined existence, and that we as appreciators engage with these depictions by deploying our imagination. Of the imaginative attitude with which appreciators engage with fictions, Kendall Walton famously characterizes it as “make-believe” (1990), whilst Peter Lamarque argues that it is comprised of a distinctive “fictional stance” (1996). Though they have important differences, these philosophical views on the nature of fiction converge on the basic idea that fictions are portrayals of imagined events.
Because fictionality arises out of the pragmatics of imaginative representation, fiction is not tied to any one medium or depictive form. Though fictional narratives are commonplace, not all fictions are narrative in nature: because it presents an imaginative scenario a sculpture such as Brâncuşi’s Bird in Space (1923) may count as a fiction. Equally, narrative comes in both fictive and non-fictive varieties; Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) would be an example of a (largely) non-fictional narrative. So, in assessing the fictive nature of video games, it is not the depictive medium that is of immediate relevance, but that games depict events and objects with an imagined existence.
Are there non-fictional games? There may be some games that do not have such a fictive component; specifically, very abstract games that lack robust representational elements. It is not clear that the early game OXO (Alexander S. Douglas, 1952) or video game versions of Sudoku present a fiction; rather they seem to allow one to play these games in a computer setting. Similarly, we might question whether Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov, 1985) depicts a fiction; Juul thinks that Tetris is ambiguous in this respect (2005, p. 167). But even Tetris seems to make it fictional that there are objects falling down the plane of the screen. Indeed, the philosophers Aaron Meskin and Jon Robson argue that given Walton’s rather inclusive theory of fiction, it is difficult to conceive of video games that are not fictional (Meskin and Robson, 2012).
Nevertheless, most video games are rather more obviously fictions because they unambiguously include depictions of places, events, and characters with an imagined existence. John Marston is fictional in being imaginary. Equally, the world of this game is an imagined one, even if its locations bear a resemblance to real places in the American Southwest. The player of Red Dead Redemption, guided by the depictions of a fictive prop, imagines that a man named Marston exists and that he has the various features ascribed to him in that fiction. We subsequently learn Marston’s story, and also about the fictional world of the game.
But critically, this account of fiction also means that the activities that the player carries out in the game world, activities that constitute the gameplay, are fictional. Even though players routinely speak about their own activities in game worlds in the first-person, the player of Red Dead Redemption does not really ride horses, hunt coyotes, or have gunfights. It is fictional that these things occur because the player imagines that his or her character engages in these activities on the basis of the depictions produced by his or her involvement in the game. I’ve never lassoed a nun and placed her on the train tracks, though I have fictionally done this through the “fictional proxy” of John Marston (Tavinor, 2009, p. 70). Thus the fiction of a video game extends beyond the world setting and narrative, to constitute the very substance of a player’s apparent activities.
One feature of Walton’s theory of fiction in particular is informative here, because it allows us to reconcile the idea that video games are fictional works with the claim that they depict virtual or simulated items. Walton notes that works of fiction are comprised of “props” that allow us to generate fictional truths and so imagine the scenarios depicted in the work (1990, p. 63). Moreover, props are diverse as they can appear in different media, and can be designed or readymade items. The props that allow us to generate the fiction of a novel are sentences, whilst those in a film are audio-visual artifacts created through filming live action and increasingly through digital animation. The fictive props in video games are the graphical, auditory, and haptic elements of a video game display (Tavinor, 2009, pp. 61–85). In Red Dead Redemption, these might include the three-dimensional model of a horse, the soundtrack element that depicts the sounds of its hooves hitting the ground, and even the rumbling of the controller that depicts that the horse is tired when it has been ridden too hard.
Clearly, the substantial way in which these depictive props differ from those in traditional fictions is that they are also interactive. It is not possible for the audience to ride Little Blackie, the horse in the film True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2010). Rather, the audience is a distanced and passive observer because the props in that fiction are not designed to allow the interaction of the audience in a way that would generate a fiction that encompasses their own activities. But in video game fictions one can fictionally ride a horse or shoot another player because of the interactivity of video game props. As a result, the participative “game worlds” alluded to in Walton’s theory of fiction, and that he thinks encompass fictive appreciators within a game of make-believe, seem especially robust in the interactive fictions of video games (Walton, 1990, pp. 58–61).
Interactivity is another concept that has been a recent topic of some concern within philosophy and it is crucial to understanding the nature of video game fictions (Lopes, 2001, 2009; Smuts, 2009; Gaut, 2010). The philosopher Berys Gaut argues that “a work is interactive just in case it authorizes that its audience’s actions partly determine its instances and their features” (2010, p. 143; emphasis in original). Understood at the grain of depictions within a fictive work, an interactive depiction is one that can be employed by audiences to make things fictional of the work in which it plays a role. The graphical depictions of horses in Red Dead Redemption are interactive in that their manipulation allows the player to depict fictional horse riding in the world of the game.
It is this media difference that tempts Aarseth to claim that the depictive artifacts in games are not fictions, even though he is also reluctant to employ the concept of interactivity (1997, p. 48). But understanding the nature of interactive fiction allows us to characterize the relationship of fiction to virtuality, and to answer the first challenge described in the initial section of this essay. Virtual does not imply “non-existent” or “imagined”; rather, the concept of virtuality, in its vernacular sense, means as good as, or amounting to. A virtual item is one that bears the function of an original item in a non-actual way. Hence, virtual items are isomorphs of the items they depict or instantiate, allowing an interaction of the kind one might have with the actual object (Tavinor, 2011a). And so, via the Internet, one can shop in a virtual store and never leave the couch.
Similarly, the virtual horse riding seen in Red Dead Redemption exists because the depictive artifact in this case bears the function that actual riding has, that of using a horse as a means of transport. But this does not mean that the horse riding in Red Dead Redemption is not fictional; rather it means that the fiction is an interactive one, allowing the player to employ the fictive prop to make things fictional of the world of the game. In connection with video games then, virtuality is a distinctive mode of depiction, whereas fictionality regards the ontological status of what is thus depicted. Video games are typically both fictional and virtual. This is the effective answer to challenge one: simply, video games are different kind of fiction to those with which we have previously been familiar.
It remains a possibility that even though games are fictions, that this fictional nature is somehow superficial, inconsequential, or arbitrary. Understanding the genuine role of fictions in video games requires meeting this second challenge, and so to see how crucial fiction is in most modern games we need to understand how fictionality plays a role in the ontology of games. An ontological theory is one that explains the mode of existence of some item, detailing what is necessary to its existence, how it is created and destroyed, and how single items can be instances of a kind. It is widely understood that traditional games are ontologically rooted in their algorithms (Juul, 2005, p. 60; Lopes, 2001, p. 76). An algorithm is a set of rules that can be followed to solve a computational problem. Algorithms can be used for all sorts of computational processes, from arithmetical calculations to rendering computer graphics, but their significance here is that the ontology of video games can be partly characterized as an algorithm, because video game displays are generated by rule-following computational processes. When a video game is played, the algorithm produces the output of a graphical display from the input the player makes into the controls.
A traditional game such as chess is not identified with any of its displays—that is, arrangements of pieces on a board—but rather with the algorithm (conceived here as the set of rules that define the valid progressions of the game) that is used to produce such displays (Juul, 2005, pp. 16–63). This is because a single game of chess can freely move between different media, in that it can be depicted on a board using pieces, transcribed as a set of shorthand descriptions, or even instantiated in the head as in blindfold chess—chess, even in its individual instances, is a “transmedial” game (Juul, 2005, pp. 48–52). The medium in which chess is depicted thus seems genuinely incidental to the game’s ontology. Illustrating the same point is that a representational artifact perceptibly identical to a game of chess would not count as chess if it was not generated by employing the chess algorithm (perhaps instead being randomly assembled, or being generated through a subtly different game algorithm that uses the same pieces and that can produce similar board patterns). Hence, for traditional games such as chess, ontology may be properly characterized solely in terms of the game algorithm, and as a result the fiction may indeed be incidental to their nature. It is this ontological analysis of games that drives the intuitions that with video games too, the fiction is incidental (Juul, 1998).
This would be a mistake, however, because the ontology of video games is not adequately characterized in the mode appropriate to traditional games such as chess (Tavinor, 2011b). Algorithms, being functionally defined, are neutral with respect to their material interpretations. Interpretation here refers to the way an abstractly defined thing is given an instantiation in a material medium. It is in this sense that a formula in propositional logic is interpreted by filling in its representational variables. When we interact with an algorithm it is always through such an instantiation or display. This is the technical reason that allows traditional games such as chess to move easily between media, because in this case a change in material interpretation does not affect the identity of a particular game, or the game in general. But with video games, the nature of the material interpretation of the game algorithm does affect game ontology. (A necessary point of clarification is that the material interpretation being referred to here is primarily the representational or depictive medium of a game; there are additional complications that arise when one considers that video games can move between software media by being ported or appearing on emulators, without a subsequent change in game identity.)
To tease out the ontological necessity of fiction in video games, compare the games The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011) and Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2008). When Fallout 3 appeared many people considered it to be “Oblivion with guns,” because The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Game Studios, 2006) and Fallout 3 shared a number of similar game mechanics (of course, that both games were produced by the studio Bethesda somewhat explains this). It was an additional irony that when The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim appeared in late 2011, some people noted that it was “Fallout 3 with swords.” Underlying the joke is an important point; part of what differentiates these two games is their art, a significant component of which is their fictions. While Skyrim and Fallout 3 do differ in terms of their game mechanics, their shared algorithm—the leveling system, perks, open-world gameplay, and so on—shows that an important part of what differentiates the games is that they have different fictions. Skyrim sets the characteristic open-world gameplay of both games within a fantasy world of dragons, swords and gold pieces; Fallout 3 is set within a post-apocalyptic world of Deathclaws, laser guns, and bottle caps. These fictions partly constitute the material interpretation of these games, and hence with these games a change in fiction is clearly sufficient to impact on game identity.
How such games are played also bears out this ontological point. The algorithms of video games such as Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Red Dead Redemption are interpreted in terms of a fiction, and it is this fiction with which the player primarily engages. Playing Red Dead Redemption is composed of hunting coyotes, gun-fighting, and searching for bandits; these activities are all fictional, and what would be left of the game if these depictive elements were stripped away would be unrecognizable as a game, likely comprised of a non-playable collection of code. If one is to play this game at all, one must imaginatively engage with this content (Tavinor, 2009, p. 135). Hence the fiction in video games such as Red Dead Redemption is not merely a setting, background or “narrative frame” to the game, but the means by which the game algorithm is depicted to the player. (But note that a game algorithm can be given different instantiations depending on exactly who is interacting with it: a player will encounter the algorithm as interpreted in term of its fiction, while a programmer may encounter the algorithm as instantiated in a programming language or graphical toolset; however the latter interaction does not instantiate the game.)
I have developed these arguments into the general claim that the ontology of video games consists of an algorithm as interpreted by a set of artistic assets, a key part of which for almost all recent games is a fiction (Tavinor, 2011b). This ontology is crucial to understanding the various authorial and appreciative practices surrounding video games, but the important point here is that this ontology means that the exclusively algorithmic ontology appropriate to traditional games such as chess is no longer appropriate for video games. Video games are (partially) ontologically rooted in their fictions. This is the answer to challenge two to the fictive thesis.
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