The Magic of Scheherazade

The next article we covered by Frasca addresses the “narratology versus ludology” debate, which Frasca claims is “a series of inaccurate beliefs in regard to the role of ludology, including that ludologists radically reject any use of narrative theory in game studies. Aptly titled Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes from a Debate that Never Took Place, Frasca takes some time to debunk some of the “most common misconceptions”, having become one of the misunderstood primary sources.

Frasca starts off by defining a narratologist according to the aforementioned debate (games “should be analyzed--at least in part--through narratology) and in “Humanities” (“a scholar who studies narratology, a set of theories of narrative that are independent of the medium of representation”). This is inherently the first “problem” for Frasca who claims that a narratologist is “a researcher who focuses on narrative in any medium, including film, literature or videogames.”

Next Frasca defines ludology as “a yet non-existent discipline that would focus on the study of games in general and videogames in particular”, quoting himself from a previous article. His purpose here is to clarify other “definitions” of ludology which Frasca claims are “simplifications”.

From his discussion of ludology’s definition, Frasca defines who the “Ludologists” are within the field. He clarifies that, in his definition of the term, a ludologist is “simply a game scholar.”

Frasca then tries to clarify who are representative of the “narrativists” (“narrative and literary theory as the foundation upon which to build a theory of interactive media”).  However, he discovers a wide lack of concrete evidence of their existence. He then goes through several quotes which prove that many of the so-called “Ludologists” (Juul, Aarseth) who held angst for narrative theory within videogame study are misquoted and misinterpreted.

Next, Frasca discusses the possibility of ludological radicalists, clarifying a misinterpreted Aarseth (with whom he spoke about the situation and who “confirmed” Frasca’s beliefs on the misrepresentation).

Misconception being Frasca’s major focus, he then harps upon the editors of Screenplay, who focused on Aarseth’s “opening editorial for the first issue of [gamestudes.org]” in Screenplay’s collection of articles on “videogames and cinema”. In the editorial, Aarseth had claimed that both cinema and literature, as fields, had made “colonizing attempts” to formal analysis of videogames. Misinterpreting Aarseth again becomes a central focus of discussion for Frasca, as others have felt that Aarseth’s phrasing concluded that narratology should be “rejected” as an “intervention” within videogame studies.

The last portion of Frasca’s contentions concerns the narrativists’ inability to fully define “what they mean by narrative”, while also clarifying how Ludologists define narrative according to ludic theory. First, Frasca brings up Gerald Prince’s definition of narrative, comparing it to Celia Pearce’s “claims that the game of Chess is a narrative.” Prince’s definition of narrative, which includes a concept of narrator and narratee, rejects Pearce’s definition of Chess as narrative because it contains neither. Frasca claims that because narrativists like Pearce “fail to make explicit” their exact definition of narrative within games, they fall prey to logical enterprise of previous theorists from prior decades of narrative study. Frasca concludes this section by stating that clearer definitions of the role of narrative within videogames must be made in order for a true debate between ludologists and narrativists to take place. He concludes the article by restating his main thesis that “ludologists [do] not reject narrative” and that “the accusations of radicalization of [said] debate are totally unfounded.”

Having discussed this debate with Chris Alton long before having read this article I was unaware of the primary misconceptions behind it. The clarification that to reject narrative theory as a ludologist is a misconception made me consider more closely the term “narrativist”, as opposed to “narratologist” when considering my own stance in the argument. Despite Frasca’s discussion in this article, I find it difficult to favour either theory over the other to analyze videogames. Rather, my analysis allows for some ludic concepts to redefine narrative concepts and vice versa. For example, discussion of protagonist within videogames seems adherent to one of two lines of thought: the player as extension of the avatar (more fixed narrative) or the avatar as an extension of the player (a less fixed narrative with more choice). By further defining the concepts of “protagonist”, “avatar”, and the role of the “player” in “protagonist-avatar-player relationship”, one could create a hybrid analysis that would blur the lines of the debate, thus conceptualizing a new method for analysis based upon both fields of study. This hybridization seems to be the future for videogame studies (as already discussed by several authors we have read, Carr and Burn to name a few).