Videogames and Canon
No, this is not what I mean at all.
I've been having some conversations with my PhD supervisor about the finer points of one of my chapters as I near completion, and some interesting angles for further writing have come up. In some ways my thesis is setting myself up for a whole lot of more specific research questions later, which I guess is a good thing. This topic is one of them.
I'm becoming more and more interested in Mass Effect as time goes on. I haven't even managed to play the third one yet, but its now on its way to me from everyone's favorite importer, OzGameShop. I've already wandered into the territory I'm going to discuss here, though, before the whole fiasco with the ending to Mass Effect 3 transpired (and continues to). My thesis, generally, doesn't deal with people at large, but more with individual players as much as possible. Yet, increasingly, it is becoming apparent that to work out some of my interesting problems, I'll have to bring in "people at large" in a pretty big way. In trying to erect a useful framework for analyzing games, both in their ludological interactivity and dramatic narrativism, I've gotten into interpretations of canon.
Authorial... authority... is a big deal in videogames that hasn't (that I've seen) really been dealt with properly yet. On the one hand, the ludologists are (unconsciously) very much promoting authorial authority. They presuppose that what the designer says, via rules, is what is true. End of story. The stuff that might be debatable, the drama/narrative, they don't even consider so that's the end of it. Players, too, tend to validate this flavour of authority; game players subject themselves to the rules of the game, and accept a priori that winning is winning is winning. Of course, there are those who subvert the game and play it differently, refuse to finish races, or griefing other players, or role-play at the expense of levelling up, etc.
The other side of this story is the canonicity of the fiction. I've touched on this in my research already, trying to work through the canon of Mass Effect in simple examples like: who is Shepard? Is Liara attracted to men or women? Facts like these are trivial to assign in a traditional narrative canon. We know who Luke Skywalker's sister is, for example. It's Canon.
My supervisor, and other scholars like him, however, place far greater emphasis on what the fans have to say than I am used to doing. In the end, I'm not very post-modern this way--I still have some respect for authority. But its pretty hard to know what's canon and what isn't when the art itself allows the player to make a range of choices. The space for interpreting and reconfiguring the text is inside the text itself, as opposed to living on fan-fic pages where Draco and Harry make out. The space continues to extend, so you can have fan-fic outside the game as well--there's plenty of it. There is a difference between making a choice inside the game (male or female, Ashley or Kaiden?) and writing a piece of fan-fic outside the game, but is it a significant difference? Is the choice made within the game more like the fan-fic, or more like an authorially, canonically true event?
Obviously there are differences: I can only make choices in Mass Effect that BioWare have put there for me, like pursuing Ashley as a romance interest. I can act within the game according to their scripts. But I can do so for all sorts of reasons, and having done so, ascribe all sorts of interpretive meaning to those episodes that have nothing to do with BioWare's authority--and this is a valid, real *thing* that media studies has legitimated over the past few decades. The reader's interpretation is as real, if not more real, than the author's intention. Let's say I pursue Ashley not because I am also an ignorant xenophobe, but because I see Ashley as young and naive, and feel a protective urge to draw her out into the world and 'educate' her. Or perhaps her naivety is in itself attractive, a kind of innocence. All these interpretations can exist in my mind, and be 'real' according to reader-response theory. Is it any different when I write it down, as fan-fiction? Is it still "real" and legitimate, or has it somehow stepped outside and become non-canon? Does canon exist, in any form, in a model that includes legitimate reader-response?
It's difficult because on one hand the answer is an ideological "no." The author is dead. Reader is king. But on the other, can any of us deny that taking a couple sniper shots to the head kills Shepard? Or that Shepard is unable to carry on multiple romances at once? There do seem to be some things our reader-response cannot quite overcome. I'm just not sure what to call that stuff, and how far it extends exactly. I know vaguely of research into fan culture, particularly by Henry Jenkins, but haven't really gone there yet. It seems even more relevant with the distinct possibility that BioWare are going to release some kind of patch ending for Mass Effect 3--a move I instantly recoil from, but find academically fascinating. If BioWare do release a patch of this kind, they have essentially relinquished their authority. The author will have abdicated the throne, and I'm not sure even a relative modernist like me will be able to keep them in power!
March 23rd, 2012 - 15:10
Meh, I’m a fan of the argument that Bioware wants to cater to their fans, and so their changing the ending is in keeping with their mission. But I agree that it seems kind of ridiculous for fans to have that power. But isn’t it also ridiculous that the player has control over parts of the story?
It feels like in a game with branching paths, where one reader will have a completely different story than another, that there is no canon, merely a collection of possible canons.
Reader-response applied to branching paths is… strange. Because part of the reader response was predicted, and resulted in the story they have (does that even make sense?). I like literary criticism applied to video games, and I think in this situation the theory needs to be extended or possibly thrown out. Maybe I’m just revealing my personal frustration with the issue.
March 23rd, 2012 - 15:11
Great read. I don’t have much to add but agree wholeheartedly when you say that if BioWare change the ME3 ending, they are abducating their authority over the saga.
March 23rd, 2012 - 16:20
Interesting stuff!
There are a number of conceptual toolsets I think might be useful for this one. The question of canon relative to branching narrative is something that’s been chewed over regarding the fundamental question of narrative itself, and how to define it. Lev Manovich, for example, argues that the narrative of a branching text is *every* possible trajectory added together – despite the fact that would be experienced as a godawful mess.
Thomas Nagel writes in “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” in ‘Mortal Questions’ about how difficult it is to usefully compare experience the further apart you are from something else… which gets exciting in this case because it’s readily obvious – as Rachel says – that people DON’T have the same experience in games, which makes things tricky.
One of my theoretical contributions that pulls stuff like this together is to look at how and why people get invested in games through an idea from Heidegger, filtered through Paddy Scannell about the ‘world of concern.’ Basic gist being that affective investment is heavily contextual, based around what people find personally relevant. This isn’t in itself vastly surprising, but it seems to be a fundamental part of how different people can engage in one text and walk away with very different powerfully affective relationships with the characters – including being comfortable noting contradictions to their personal responses in the text itself and reinterpreting them, explaining them away, or just plain not giving much of a damn.
This also works within a gaming context, as opposed to the ludological framework regarding Authorial Rules: the person playing the game is negotiating it through these rules, but they’re the one who is going to be investing in the game’s world-of-concern through them:
There are people who felt profoundly attached to Tali or Garrus in ME1, and ignored Kaiden and Ashley, despite the fact that wasn’t allowed for by the rules of the game. In ME2 (and maybe 3? I don’t know?) some of these same people didn’t necessarily *want* the rules of the game to allow for a romantic connection to the character they were attached to, because they were concerned that the game would Get It Wrong.
“There is a difference between making a choice inside the game (male or female, Ashley or Kaiden?) and writing a piece of fan-fic outside the game, but is it a significant difference? Is the choice made within the game more like the fan-fic, or more like an authorially, canonically true event?”
I think both of these exist on a spectrum, and this kind of question is exactly what I poke at in the PhD. Both making that kind of decision in a game when allowed for by its textual structure, and writing fanfic, are occasions where the player is directly participating in their own world-of-concern with characters in the text. However, the ‘official’ participation may be less satisfying for some people, because they have less agency in deciding how things turn out: what if choosing Ashley, say, happens for ‘the wrong reasons’ in the game, or the emotional complexion of the relationship dynamic doesn’t fit?
On the other hand, there are people perfectly comfortable throwing up their hands when something they think is clunky happens in a character dynamic in the game (or book, or film, or movie) and declaring that as, essentially, “non-canon” because the writers got it wrong, and who will focus instead on the bits that work. Their worlds-of-concern include the bits that they want to invest in, elide the parts that don’t, and their own contributions to the world-of-concern expand to fill-in the gaps.”
This is something you can see the whole time in things like tabletop gaming, where someone wants to do a modern reimagining of the game “Exalted,” and there’s a lot of support for it. But as soon as the people who support the idea start talking about “And these are the traits that *simply must* be a defining part of the game in order for it to count as Exalted,” it turns out that nobody’s list is mostly or even partly the same. And then you get multiple schisms to the point where it turns out that everyone really wants their own vision of such a game.
in other words, it’s a very interesting mess.
I haven’t played ME3 yet, so I’m not sure how it’s all going to work. If I had to guess, based on the tenor of the responses across the Good/Bad spectrum, I’d say that there are people for whom the ending lined up *enough* with their own worlds-of-concern that they could accept it, and there are those for whom it was completely disconnected from anything they cared about.
At that point, it’s not properly about whether the ending was Good or Bad, it’s about a section of the populace who – at the end of Return of the Jedi – are mystified about why the story carefully wraps up the lives of everyone at the Mos Eisley cantina, *as if they were always the core of the story.*
Some people will be complaining because the game didn’t let them be Sufficiently Awesome. And fair enough, that’s what they invested in and there wasn’t a payoff, and we can get into discussions about essentially genre expectations. There are going to be other people honestly mystified about why the game didn’t give closure to The Important Parts Of The World And The People In It. And to an extent, that was always going to happen. What’s interesting is that it seems to have happened to enough people to get spotted.
If that makes sense. Probably a disorganised rant, but hopefully some points will be visible in the mess.
March 23rd, 2012 - 16:59
Is this not the same argument as canon in a choose your own adventure story? The story telling is supplemented by the readers / players decisions, but there are a finite number of decisions to make, a finite number of paths to follow, and a finite number of endings to experience. The entire world and the decisions that reside within it only exist because of the author, but in this case instead of leading the reader / player around by the nose, they are given the “freedom” to play how they want and effect an outcome based on their own decision making.
In these cases canon is in the eye of the beholder, and what makes it so good is not that there is one story for everyone to follow, but the simulation that everyone who plays gets to make their own story (despite the restriction of finite decision making). There are still actions that exist outside of the readers / players decision making, and you could refer to that as canon, but then when it comes to games like this, is a singular canon all that important or should we be placing more emphasis on realistic reaction to decision making, and realistic decision options being presented? You are appealing to different parts of the brain, parts that have to consider the consequences of the decisions made rather than formulating hypotheses and experiencing anticipation at what will happen next based on what they know so far.
Role play and story telling have coexisted for many many years now, so I think a better question to ask would be can one exist without the other?
April 7th, 2012 - 00:03
The thing I’d point out is something that I think is highlighted in your last paragraph. “can any of us deny… that Shepard is unable to carry on multiple romances at once?” Well, no, *in the work*. But that’s the whole point. Even the most post-structuralist position doesn’t deny that the work exists, or that the author produced it. The post-structuralist position isn’t about denying that “Shepard is unable to carry on multiple romances at once” within the work itself, just that because the reader/player can never get outside of their own position in relation to the work, they can never really access the work entirely on its own. So it doesn’t give primacy to the work in determining the text and its meaning, any more than it gives primacy to the author.
The only thing that’s really different in games is that the work itself is procedural, not predetermined, hence the actual work as presented to any given reader/player is not necessarily the same as that presented to any other. A useful comparison here is to instances where multiple versions of a work, say a novel or play, exist. Traditionally one is deemed the authoritative version, even if only for a given reading. The difference in games is that such differences are inherent to the medium, and the number of versions of the of a game as a work is gargantuan, accounting for not just different player choices, but the variation in presentation of different hardware, versions of software, playing with or without DLC or mods, etc. It’s obviously useless even to consider a particular version of the bare game code and assets as the authoritative version of the game.
The way I think you have to deal with the stuff you talk about in your final paragraph is to say, “Shepard is unable to carry on multiple romances at once” within the work constituted by the game code. But you can’t give that any more authority in determining the meaning of the text than you would give the line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” in a novel. The reader/player still interprets that in their own way.
April 7th, 2012 - 10:11
Kinda slightly going off what Adrian has already said, this paradox (I guess) is why I prefer to think of the game’s developers as authors of a world of affordances and constraints that the player is able to act in. This way you have a world of possibilities constraining and affording the player that are very much authored, and are built as much by audiovisual representation as by mechanical systems, and anything the player ‘does’ is within that authored world. This early on a Saturday I can’t recall which scholars have argued this but this blog post outlines the position fairly well: http://www.hobbygamedev.com/spx/games-are-artificial-videogames-are-not-games-have-rules-videogames-do-not/
As a vague side, I’ve been reading Aarseth’s Cybertext of late and while it’s terribly problematic in a lot of places, I do find his position on how little choice/authorship the “hyertext” reader has compared to the book reader. The book reader can realistically turn to whatever page they want whenever they want whereas the hypertext reader can *only* follow the link that the author has given them. I know hypertext and games aren’t entirely interchangeable, but I found that a really interesting reversal of the way we think about players and choice and authorship and all those things.