Wieder mal durfte ich den MIT C3 Newsletter befüllen und da sich der Artikel mit dem Zusammenhang zwischen Medienkonvergenz und dem Story Potential von Computerspielen auseinandersetzt, soll er auch hier ein zu Hause finden.
No More "Narratively Inconvenienced"?
Story-Pleasure Through Complementary Media Use in Lord of the Rings online
By: Doris C. Rusch
A new door has opened to the famous narrative universe created by J.R.R. Tolkien. With the MMPORG Lord of the Rings online (LoR) it has become possible to dig oneself even deeper into the world of Frodo Baggins and his fellows and to add an interactive experience to the pleasures of reading the books and watching the films.
Admittedly, I was skeptical at first. Yes, I liked the books well enough and I had watched the films several times, twice all three of them in a row (extended version!). But still, I could not imagine how a story as complex and dense as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings could be satisfyingly conveyed into a game. After all, games are still a little "narratively inconvenienced". The attempts at storytelling made so far mostly by single player games often suffered from poor hypothesis building opportunities for the players. What would happen next? You only knew when you had tried and failed once. "Learning by dying," as Gunter Hager, game designer at Games that Matter likes to call it. But when surprise always gets the better of suspense, the narrative experience lacks an essential quality.
With LoR, things are different. LoR is a story-centered MMPORG that manages to significantly regulate player interest through the story. The story is absolutely central to the playing experience and a good reason to stay put just another hour longer. But the reason for this interactive miracle cannot be found within the medium itself, but is due to the complementary use of various platforms. Basing the game on Tolkien's world and its famous events facilitates in-game hypothesis building by providing a well-known out-of-game reference system that strengthens the game's fictional components. Like in the early days of filmmaking, when filmmakers relied on the familiarity of the plots they used rather than on their medium specific storytelling expertise to cognitively and emotionally engage their viewers, LoR uses the familiarity of the story to keep the player glued to the keyboard. However, it is important to note that it does so by offering a different angle to the known events, not by regurgitating them.
The game is structured in books and chapters, which proceed in a linear, pre-defined fashion. Epic quests that follow a fixed sequence and can only be finished in a group (or a "fellowship" as groups are called in LoR) move the storyline forward towards the liberation of middle earth. Between epic quests there are numerous normal single and group quests that give the player some space to level up so he / she will be up to the next challenge in the epic quest series, explore the world in a more liberal way and to flesh out his / her character.
Naturally, the epic quests have the strongest connection to the events known from the books and films. But since one does not play Frodo or any of his immediate fellows, but a more distant cooperator, complex hypothesis building processes are initiated. The way the game ties up to the known events without simply reproducing them keeps the player guessing and interested. Two main categories of player interest regulating interrelations between books / films and game can be identified:
The first category deals with visible gaps in the background story left by the books and films. I like to think of this category as the "I've always wondered..." category. E.g. I have always wondered why Gimly and Legolas are wary of each other. What is the story behind the racial conflict between elves and dwarfs? The game offers many answers to this sort of question. By providing different information depending on which race -- hobbit, human, elve or dwarf -- you choose to play, it further stimulates exchange between players (or motivates the player to play different races to get the full picture).
The second category of interrelations between game and previous media that regulate player interest deals with the tension that arises from recognizing a familiar element and wondering how it will be instrumentalized in the game. When you enter the Old Forest you know that it will be dangerous and that somewhere along the line, you will meet Tom Bombadill. But you do not know what your dealings with him will be. Or take the quests revolving around the Weathertop. Without the previous knowledge from the books / films, the Weathertop is just another location -- a platform overlooking plain lowlands. But once you know that this is a place of drama, that Frodo was severly injured there by the witch-king, you look up at the little hill with a sense of foreboding and anticipation. What has this place in store for you? It is clear that something dramatic has to happen there, something that echoes the meaning this location had in the book or the film. And you will hang on until you know what role you are playing in the context of the already familiar story.
LoR is a true enhancement of Tolkien's narrative universe and it consists of countless cross-references to the original plot. It is an intellectual pleasure to recognize elements from the book, to realize when the game fills another gap, to hypothesize about when and where one will cross paths with Gandalf and Strider again and in which way one is going to influence the further course of events.
Games as media might still have a problem to initiate narrative hypothesis building processes. In many games, the story will still be a reward at best (if not a nuisance), not the main reason to keep playing. But until we have learnt to couple rules and fiction in a way that allows the fiction to stay in the foreground of player interest during game-play, making good use of multi-media storytelling seems to be a very effective way to overcome the challenges games face in this regard.
Doris C. Rusch is an consulting researcher with the Convergence Culture Consortium. She has done postdoctoral work at the Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria and worked as community manager for the online game Papermint through Austrian game company Avaloop. She is preparing to take a postdoctoral position with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in the Program at Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
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