Extra Lives by Tom Bissell Read Free Book Online

and theoreticians refer to as the “ludonarrative,” is unscripted and gamer-determined—the “fun” portions of the “played” game—and usually amounts to some frenetic reconception of getting from point A to point B. The differences between the framed narrative and the ludonarrative are what make story in games so unmanageable: One is fixed, the other is fluid, and yet they are intended, however notionally, to work together. Their historical inability to do so may be best described as congressional.
    An example of such narrative cross-purpose can be found in Infinity Ward’s first-person shooter
Call of Duty 4
. In one memorable sequence, moving forward the framed narrative requires you and a computer-controlled partner to crawl and sneak your way through the irradiated farmlands of Chernobyl in order to assassinate an arms dealer. The ludonarrative, meanwhile, is the actual (and, as it happens, pretty thrilling) process of getting there. If you choose to be a dick and frag your partner, it has only ludonarrative consequences. At worst, you have to start the mission over. No matter what you do, the framed narrative does not change: You and he need to get there together.
Call of Duty 4
is a game with little to no ambition to change the emotional outlook of anyone who plays it. It is a war-porn story of good and evil. All the same, the chasm between its framed narrative and ludonarrative calls attention to the artificiality of both. While the former attempts to be narratively meaningful, the latter is concerned only with being exciting. The former grants the player no agency and thus has no emotional resonance because the latter, with its illusion of agency, does nothing to reinforce what that resonance might be, otherthan that shooting your friend in the head is bad news. Believing in the game’s fiction often becomes as difficult as obeying orders issued by a world-class hypocrite. For a game of
Call of Duty 4
’s simplistic themes, this is a problem of glancing consequence. For games of greater ambition, however, the problem becomes exponentially larger.
(Call of Duty 4
does offer a couple of formally compelling experiences. One is that it kills off the character you assume you will control for the duration in a mid-game helicopter crash, but not before allowing you to take a few disoriented steps from the wreckage—altogether an eerie sequence. Another is the game’s opening, which grants the gamer the helpless first-person POV of a man being driven, it becomes increasingly evident, to his execution. This sequence ends with the gamer being shot, jarringly, in the face.)
    Several games have lately been experimenting with allowing decisions made during the ludonarrative to alter the framed narrative, most notably in
Fallout 3
and Lionhead’s
Fable II
, but this is mainly expressed in how you are perceived by other characters. Once a game comes along that figures out a way around the technical challenges of allowing a large number of ludonarrative decisions to have framed-narrative-altering consequences—none of which challenges I understand but whose existence several game designers sighingly confirmed for me—an altogether new form of storytelling might be born: stories that, with your help, create themselves. There is, of course, another word for stories that, with your help, create themselves. That word is
life
. So would this even be a good thing?
    I am not so sure. When I am being entertained, I am also being manipulated. I am
allowing
myself to be manipulated. I am, in other words, surrendering. When I watch television, one of our less exalted forms of popular entertainment, I am surrendering to the inevitability of commercials amid bite-sized narrative blocks.When I watch a film, the most imperial form of popular entertainment—particularly when experienced in a proper movie theater—I am surrendering most humiliatingly, for the film begins at a time I cannot control, has nothing to sell me that I