We are very happy to announce that Haunted Planet Studios, the company run by Games & Narrative Group member Mads Haahr, has received two awards at the Irish Games Festival for a game based on Bram Stoker’s (author of Dracula) life and narrative world.
Bram Stoker’s Vampires won in the categories:
Bram Stoker’s Vampires is available on iTunes and Google Play.
MA Thesis “The Cross-Media Journey of Muddle Earth: Design, Narrative and Brand Consistency in Game Adaptation”, by Claudio Franco, University of London
Abstract: A study of game production in the context of cross-media strategies, it follows the adaptation journey of the Muddle Earth IP from a book, into a TV series, and finally into a game.
Free download at: http://transmediabooks.wordpress.com/ma-thesis-the-cross-media-journey-of-muddle-earth/
In my last post, I discussed the location-based augmented-reality game Bram Stoker’s Vampires. I outlined the basic game concept and discussed how locations that were relevant to Stoker’s life as a student in Trinity College Dublin were used for geo-locating characters related to his novel Dracula. One of the characteristics of the game that I didn’t get to fully discuss in the first post is its narrative structure. I will do that in this post and I will also explain the flexibility in the narrative structure that our game engine affords.
Advertising is becoming more pervasive and advergames, games for promotional purposes, play an ever increasing role. This blog post will underline the narrative components of a very successful case in this field, Magnum Pleasure Hunt (MPH), and its relation with other traditional advertisements for the same brand.
Magnum Pleasure Hunt (Lowe Brindfors, 2011) was part of a worldwide online campaign launched by Unilever to promote its Magnum ice-cream products. In terms of reach, the game was considered highly successful – with more that 7.000.000 players and an average engagement of 5 minutes for each user. The campaign propagated virally on several social networking sites and its hashtag was one of the Twitter trends the day of its launch. In this sense, MPH was deemed a success and convinced Unilever to finance two sequels in the following years.
From a more ludological point of view, MPH can be critiqued for its game-design shortcomings, for example flaws in level design. However, this specific post will concentrate on the narrative and semiotic features that MPH shares with other commercials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVEnHsnNxmg
MPH is a Flash-based side-scrolling platform game, following most of the conventions of this genre. Its main narrative theme is “a Hunt for Pleasure across the Internet”, represented by the avatar trying to collect the highest possible number of Magnum products while literally running through several commercial websites – both fictional and depicting real-world brands. The designers of MPH transformed ordinary webpages into rudimentary game levels: while eidetic, chromatic and figurative components of webpages (abstract forms, colors and represented images) remain the same, their functions are altered – i.e. a text box is no more simply part of a page but also becomes a platform over which the avatar can jump.
While the dream of French Structuralism of developing a universal, canonical narrative schema is no longer plausible, this school of thought still provides useful tools for analyzing specific commercials. Parts of their methodology can help us understand advergames and serves as a complement to other descriptive methodologies in this field.
From a semiotic perspective, advertising relies on simple plans that isolate the core values of a brand and actualize them in a compelling narrative text exemplifying their identity, their essence.
Some well-know semiotic mechanisms govern this strategies, such as embodying core values in actors and objects and composing a basic narration – often a simplified “quest narrative”. In the past decade, Unilever associated its Magnum brand with luxury and pleasure, inventing and marketing the Magnum bliss as a euphoric, temporary state reached through chocolate-covered ice-creams. Its core values, luxury and pleasure, are complementary in recent Magnum texts: sometimes one is presented as instrumental for reaching the other, but the Magnum brand identity incorporates both. The MPH advergame also adheres to this strategy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mVK5QcP1Vs
Pleasure, luxury and their related semantic associations are translated quite literally into MPH, in its levels and in some game-elements. As the title suggests, MPH represents the avatar’s hunt for the highest possible form of pleasure as she runs across several websites suggesting pleasurable situations. During gameplay, the avatar traverses a good number of upscale websites (and the player, metaphorically, browses them) from hi-tech gadgets to haute-couture, exotic hotels and spas. Cutscenes between levels show other luxury experiences – a shower in an expensive hotel, renting a glider on the Swiss Alps – but the protagonist sprints past all of them. During her quest for “ultimate pleasure”, the avatar encounters two varieties of Magnum icecreams: first, “Magnum bon-bons” must be collected to earn points and, later, a full-size Magnum Caramel icecream is presented as the final reward – the object embodying ultimate pleasure and luxury. From a structural semiotic point of view, the main subject is on a quest and tests several potential objects before finding the perfect one, the Magnum icecream, that emerges as the best synthesis of pleasure and luxury.
However, in conclusion, we have to remember that – even if it was considered a success as a viral campaign that propagated across social media – MPH is not a satisfying game per se for a number of reasons outside the scope of this post. In brief, what we can say here is that despite an unusually high production value, the designers of MPH reduced agency to safeguard narrative development and consistency. For example, it is impossible to lose/fail as the avatar always reaches the end of the game: in this way the quest always ends by reaching the Magnum-branded apotheosis. This is obviously atypical and disappointing from a ludic perspective.
We have described how narrative structures and narrative roles are used in advertising and advergames to express the core semantic values characterizing a brand-identity. MPH has been successful in engaging a considerable number of players and represents a good example of how commercials are currently being translated into advergames. Magnum Pleasure Hunt demonstrated, once again, to advertisers and creative directors the potential and the reach of advergames – we hope that, in the future, such products will feature ludic elements as polished as their production value.
More reading
post co-written by Gabriele and Hartmut
“There needs to be a word – writes British journalist Jonathan Jones – for the overly serious and reverent praise of digital games by individuals or institutions who are almost certainly too old, too intellectual and too dignified to really be playing at this stuff. Gamecrashing? Gamebollocks? Spiellustfaken?”.
The occasion for Jones’ invention of the “gamebollocks” neologism is the recent announcement that computer games will be acquired and displayed alongside more conventional works of art at the MoMa museum in New York. Similar events, including The Art of Video Games exhibition hosted by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, have already been organized in the past.
Location-Based Games are games in which the gameplay involves moving around an actual physical environment. The particular mechanics associated with this may differ significantly between titles, and can involve chase mechanics (such as Can You See Me Now? or Zombies Run!) or collection mechanics (such as Pac-Manhattan), territorial mechanics (such as Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary) and conventional fantasy RPG mechanics of combat, levelling and skill specialization (such as Shadow Cities). Despite the range of mechanics used, titles tend to be heavy on gameplay and light on narrative. The games we make at my game studio Haunted Planet Studios are different in their ambition in this regard, and in this and a few follow-up posts, I will discuss some of the ways in which we try and tell stories with our recent titles.
Our basic narrative unit is a case (as in a case solved by a detective), and each of the games I will discuss in this blog post series constitutes one case. A case takes place in its own universe with its own characters, backstory and plot development, but several cases can of course share the same universe. The case is also an important gameplay unit and corresponds roughly to a level or a quest in other games. When a player has completed a case, they have solved a mystery and feel a sense of satisfaction. During play, our game engine stages a case, either in a specific site (such as a historical site or a theme park) where we have picked the specific location for each encounter or in a randomized fashion where the player happens to be at the time. All the cases together make up an overarching story — that the world is full of ghosts, that Earth is a haunted planet.
Of particular interest in this photo is the building in the background — it is the Graduates Memorial Building (GMB) in Trinity College, which is home to two of the University’s oldest and most prominent student societies: the Philosophical Society (“the Phil”) and the Historical Society (“the Hist”). Bram Stoker himself was a student at Trinity College and served as President of the Phil and Auditor of the Hist, so it is of historical relevance that the player encounters one of Stoker’s characters in this particular spot. Although it is hard to see in the photo, the GMB also makes a terrific backdrop to a ghostly encounter and greatly adds to the atmosphere. Curious readers can explore the building’s exterior (by daylight) via the Virtual Tour.
The ability of reflecting on itself is a common feature of every complex semiotic system. The practice of literary criticism and the disciplines of semiotics and narratology show that it is possible to use verbal languages to examine and analyze written texts. To do so, for example, semioticians adopt a specialized meta-language to produce precise descriptions of meaning-making mechanisms and strategies.
But narratological analyses are only one example of meta-reflections. From artistic practices, for instance surreal or satirical texts making fun of existing literary conventions, to didactic texts, i.e. manuals on writing, to commercial services, such as book reviews: the meta-usage of verbal language is more widespread than it is commonly expected.
Meta-narrative texts are also possible, and the works of novelists such as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges are frequently quoted as paradigmatic examples. As another example, more grounded in contemporary pop culture, we can consider Stephen King’s book series The Dark Tower – in which King himself and his work as a writer are situated in the narrative framework. Meta-cinema and meta-theatre are also possible – as François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine and Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author show.
What about meta-games? Tony Key from Ubisoft defined at least part of the plot of Assassin’s Creed as a meta-story. Indeed, the game features multiple layers of narration – each one with its own characters, avatars, plots and actions. But there may be more: as Italian semiotician Dario Compagno recently argued in his book “Dezmond“, in the Assassin’s Creed franchise we control an avatar – Desmond Miles – who uses some kind of technological machinery to re-live the experiences of his ancestors – including the iconic Ezio Auditore. Desmond not only perceives Ezio’s actions, but he controls them as if he was playing a computer game: if the player fails, the event is diegetically represented as a system failure and he’s allowed to try again. In short, the Assassin’s Creed series is composed by games in which we control another “player” and, through him, a second-order avatar.
Could it be possible to imagine more examples? I recently collaborated with G|A|M|E Journal to launch the Games on Games project, an open call for games that describe, theorize on, critique and discuss other games. In other words, in our Call for Games we wrote that the project “originates from the hypothesis that it is possible and fruitful to critique video games and their related themes by adopting their own forms, mechanics and languages”.
I am excited and curious about the submissions that the GoG project will receive, but I am also very interested in discovering other meta-gaming pieces such as Dario’s reading of Assassin’s Creed. You may point us towards other examples by commenting on this blog, and you’re invited to submit your original creations to the Games on Games project.
Narrative in a platform game? Maybe not in the sense of a coherent and complete narrative experience. Yet, there is something in Arnt Jensen’s Limbo – a highly stylized, evocative atmosphere, that simultaneously elevates the game well above the average in the platformer space and raises awareness for the potential of atmosphere as part of a narrative strategy in interactive and game narrative.
Presented entirely in shades between white and back, the game takes visual clues from black and white silent movies and animations but transforms this aesthetic for digital media into a representation with a limited palette of shades reminiscent of cut-outs that includes visual effects like transparent water and fire, as well as a reduced but efficient sound design.
Whaiwhai (log607, 2009-2011) is a series of of locative games designed by the Italian studio log607. It attracted considerable national and international media coverage, winning the Italian award “Primo Premio per l’Innovazione” (First Prize for Innovation) in 2009 and being presented at the Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
I have already worked on this subject with Giovanni Caruso, Riccardo Fassone and Mauro Salvador – and we presented a multi-dimensional tool for the analysis of locative apps. In this post, however, I will focus exclusively on Whaiwhai.
This is what our logo symbolizes – a joystick merged with a writing quill, as in computer gaming meets narrative. This encounter is hardly a new one, as it can be traced back to early 1980s text-based adventure games like Zork pronouncing themselves to be “interactive fiction.” And it is hardly an uncomplicated one as the ludology vs narratology [1,2] debate has shown, stating in the late 1990s, in which ludologists effectively declared narrative and interactivity to be largely incompatible. This sometimes heated debate lost most of its initial steam and was finally put to rest by Gonzalo Frasca [3] and Janet Murray [4]. Yet even now, with games studies scholars seemingly embracing narrative as indicated by Espen Aarseth recently calling Jesper Juul, Markku Eskelinen, and Gonzalo Frasca “narratologists” (in a keynote at ICEC 2012 as reported by Michael Nietsche), the debate is far from over, as a recent discussion on Gamasutra indicates.
Not only is the debate far from over, it has hardly begun, as Frasca’s paper rightly indicates, the “debate on the issue never took place” [3]. But what is the issue? Beyond “discipline trouble” between games studies positions and perspectives more formally routed in traditional humanities, there still is the largely unanswered question of narrative in computer games and other interactive forms in digital media. I have suggested elsewhere that one point of departure from which to explore this exciting field is to take digital interactive forms as a new kind of narrative, dissimilar from traditional forms such as the novel, the movie, or the stage play, and therefore requiring a separate theoretical understanding [5]. I feel this ongoing theoretical investigation is necessary to ultimately answer Frasca’s rightful challenge for an “alternative definition of narrative” [3] and Marie-Laure Ryan’s call for the theoretical definition of an expanded range of “narrative modalities,” [6] which Frasca also references.
However, one point of departure is hardly sufficient to fully describe as big a phenomena as interactive narrative in digital media. This understanding has lead to the Games and Narrative group, which combines a range of perspectives, from semiotics to psychological aspects to media studies. We are aware of the differences in our points of view, but we do not see them as mutually exclusive, and rather as interconnected pieces that help us move along on a path towards a better description and understanding. This is what we mean when we present different perspectives as steps towards a unified theory of interactive digital narrative, in an upcoming article for the journal Transactions on Edutainment.
What also unites us is a perspective that connects theory and practice. As theorists/practitioners, as creators of interactive digital narratives (Digdem and Tonguc), CEO of a game company (Mads), designer of location-based games (Gabriele), and creator of an interactive narrative authoring system and practicing artist (yours truly) we are as keenly aware of the practical challenges of digital media as we are of the theoretical implications. Moreover, we feel that the practice and its particular challenges informs and enhances our theoretical understanding.
Finally, our logo indicates a unity of narrative and games/interactivity and thus symbolizes the departure from a perspective that takes the two elements as separate. The narrative we are talking about is inherently interactive and not narrative with interactivity tugged on. Interactivity then is not just another design parameter to think about, but rather a fundamental element. In contrast, Henry Jenkins has pointed out [7] what elements of traditional storytelling can be used as starting points for interactive digital narrative. He is certainly not alone in taking the story in more traditional media as the focal point. Our understanding re-centers the focus on narrative forms in interactive digital media and computer games. This change of perspective allows us to see not just derivative forms of narrative, but a new exciting opportunity for human expression.