An Ontological Theory of Narrative Works: Storygame as Postclassical Literature

Abstract

An Ontological Theory of Narrative WorksStorygame as Postclassical Literature Veli-Matti Karhulahti (bio) For the delight of those increasing numbers of busy people who aim to maximize the efficiency of their daily activities, the market man invented iPod: an apparatus that enables filling all moments of unproductive tranquillity with a continuous flow of cultured information. After years of resistance I too succumbed one spring when I found The A.B.C. Murders (Agatha Christie 1936) audiobook. From then on, a mystery about a murderer leaving abc railroad guides at crime scenes progressed every time I went on my weekly jog. Keeping up with the unraveling enigma turned out as a challenge, however. As my attention roamed around everyday sights and sounds, many of the aurally narrated details seemed to bypass my cognition. Eventually, I could not make out any of Hercule Poirot’s deductions due to my lack of recollecting Lady Clarke, Sir Carmichael, and many other key characters: the voice narrated, but my mystery did not progress. While on [End Page 39] the empirical level the work moved on flawlessly, on my conceptual level it had stopped. Narrative works such as The A.B.C. Murders are often distinguished from storygames, generally understood as videogames with high narrativity, by the compulsoriness of the latter’s demands: storygames cannot be progressed without prominent efforts.1 This disparity can be traced back to the origins of storygame research (Niesz and Holland 1984; Buckles 1985; Randall 1988) but is commonly credited to Espen Aarseth’s cybertext theory. In Aarseth’s model, the core difference between the two lies in the storygame’s “ergodic” nature. A closer analysis of the concept of “ergodic” is given later in this article, yet at the present point it suffices to observe how for Aarseth the challenges (“aporias”) of texts are overcome by solutions (“epiphanies”) that can be “ergodic” or “nonergodic” depending on the compulsiveness of manipulative success: Compared to the epiphanies of [nonergodic] texts, the ergodic epiphanies are not optional, something to enhance the aesthetic experience, but essential to the exploration of the event space. Without them, the rest of the work cannot be realized. (Aarseth 1999: 36) At the same time that this notion of the storygame as an exclusively demanding narrative work has become something of a datum in the academic field,2 investigations into the narrational peculiarities of the videogame have tended to focus on its multicursal event structures. As tropes like “emergent narrative” (Galyean 1995), “interactive film” (Bolter and Grusin 1999/2000), and “interactive narrative” (Mateas and Stern 2007) continue to dominate storygame research, they mostly fail to explain what makes these ludonarratives ludonarratives next to the astronomical spectrum of other “interactive” or “ergodic” narrative phenomena. Multicursal event structures have never been exclusive to the storygame. This article seeks to identify the storygame as a narrative phenomenon by proposing a demand-based ontological theory that recognizes narrative works through the demands they set (or “entail,” in less-anthropomorphic language) for their progression. Recalling Tzvetan Todorov’s advice concerning the theoretical research of “literature,” [End Page 40] rather than playing with the notion of “narrative,” the idea here is to produce an ontological base for theorizing more and less narrational “work” types: Instead of the simple notion of literature we now have a number of different types of discourse, each equally deserving of attention. If the choice of our object of study is not dictated by purely ideological reasons (which would then have to be spelled out), we no longer have the right to limit ourselves to purely literary subspecies. (1973/2007: 11) The point of departure is that no narrative phenomenon (including the “interactive” or “ergodic” one) is capable of setting compulsory progression demands that block access to the rest of the work. The point of procedure is that all narrative works set optional progression demands, the fulfilling of which is required to access some parts of the work. While all narrative works are thus inherently demanding, the recently proliferated computational ones, the storygame par excellence, do seem to have the potential to be more so (in a quantitative sense). These extrademanding narrative works are the prime subject of the...