The Role of the Player - The Player is Both Audience and Storyteller - Extra Credits

Every major medium has a great deal of theory behind it. Music theory, film theory, literary theory. Not games so much though. Okay, technically game theory is a thing, but that's a branch of mathematics, not quite what I'm talking about. But we are just beginning to explore how to think about our medium as we create within it. We are as an industry and a community starting to define or at least to spouse some of the theoretical grounding for creating our art. So today we'll be talking some theory. Normally this is the sort of topic James would write about for Gamasutra or some other industry facing publication meant to be read by fellow game developers. But I decided that really we should be having these conversations as a community more often rather than just keeping them as esoteric as shared only amongst those who build games for a living, especially given today's topic. Today we'll be talking about the role of the player. Our medium is unique. It is as we've said before an inherently interactive medium. A medium where the audience isn't merely audience but participatory. This does something peculiar to our medium. It means that we as developers

ship products that are by necessity incomplete. A painting on a wall is a finished work. A movie on a reel is whole and complete. A novel on a shelf is what it will always be. But a game without a player is nothing. In any other artistic medium people may interpret a given work differently, but they won't fundamentally experience it differently. Okay, you could argue that color blind people perceive paintings and stuff differently. Whatever, you get what I mean. So what does this mean for us? Well, in any medium the creative process ends when the artist sets down their work for the last time, ready perhaps to be reproduced but not to be changed. That definition gets tricky when we try to apply it to games. We could try to alter this definition to fit our medium a little better, but if we do that we end up with definitions so broad as to be useless, or we find ourselves lost in epicycles and logical backbending in order to make our revised definition still fit with other media. So instead let's just assume that this definition's also true for games. And if that's the case then it means the player is a part of the artistic processes. Their actions are generative. Without their help games are left incomplete. They must indubitably be considered an artist. Now of course the degree to which the player participates in creation varies. In some cases, we as developers merely set out the canvas and the paints for the player

to work with. In others, the player simply puts the finishing touches on our work. But any actor will tell you that's true of their discipline as well. Some roles are in every scene. Some roles pass through with an area line, but they're all artists helping to create their art. Heck, even developers will tell you this is also true for people on the development team. Sometimes a game will require a great deal from one discipline, but not from another. This is the nature of collaborative art. But if the player is an artist in our art, what does that mean? What does it imply that the player is doing when they play? Well, they're creating. They're writing their own story and exploring their own ideas within the constraints of their art. This is as true for Mario as it is for Fallout or The Sims. So, all right, good. We now have the conceptualization of player as storyteller instead of player as audience, but why do we care? Is there any practical side to this or is it all just simply hot air? Well, now we've hit the roof of it. A theory with no application is meaningless, and here the application is in the way we approach playing and crafting games. For centuries, we've studied the effect of art and narrative on an audience. We've looked into literary symbolism and the effect of color. We've studied how story structure and composition affect the viewer. We've even created a whole litany of referential narratives that we can use as a symbolic shorthand to

convey things to our audience. In fact, much of the foundations of psychology come from the study of the effect of a story on the listener. As far back as Aristotle, we were looking at why we would ever want to see a tragedy or listen to a song that made us sad. Much of Freud is based on the Oedipus myth, and Jung was famous for his examinations of our folklore and mythic traditions. We've delved deep into how we use art to affect other human beings. But what we've not looked into quite as much is the role of the storyteller themselves. We know why the initiate sits at the campfire listening to the ancient tales, but what of the shaman? What of the artist who must create? Why do they create? What acts of creation have what effects on our psyche? What creation is most enjoyable or most healing or even most evocative of specific emotions? Is creation merely a personal act referencing only the secret inner life of the individual, or are there universal aspects to creation that might allow us to make a more satisfying creative experience? This is where we must look to create better games. We must explore the role of the storyteller as well as the listener, and think of our players as both the bard telling their own tale and as the audience, our reader or viewer experiencing it. We have to accept that simply because players are telling their own story to themselves through games does not make

the storytelling invalid. In fact, we've often cited the value of make-believe for young children or the revelatory power of dreams. Art and creation is a way to get in touch with our own psyches. Games are in fact not merely escapist, but rather a form of expression. They're a way for us to tell ourselves about ourselves, even if we don't recognize we're doing it. This is true for all games, from Pong to Mass Effect, from a multiplayer session of Call of Duty to 72 hours alone with Planescape Torment. They're all ways of expressing ourselves. If we can conceptualize the player not only as we would the audience and in any other medium, but as an artist in their own right working with the limited tools the game designer has given them, we'll be able to create better games by simply not ignoring this central part of the way the player experiences any game. If we can study the role of the storyteller and the role of the artist, we can learn to make more effective experiences for the player. If we can accept that we as developers are not the sole proprietors of our art, we may be able to build more immersive worlds, more compelling mechanics, and even more engaging narratives for players to tell their own story. If you've ever told your buddies about a Halo match or thought about the career arc of your World of Warcraft character or felt to yourself that quiet triumph of striding through the halls of Dracula's castle or the tension of being alone in a Metroid-filled corridor, you

know this is true. As Oscar Wilde said it, "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." Thanks for watching. See you next week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.