Chapter 10
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld
    
    David Surman
    Introduction
    n 2004 British videogame developer Lionhead Studios, in association with its subsidiary company Big Blue Box, released Fable on Microsoft’s XBOX console, a role-playing videogame in which you play an orphaned boy who matures into a hero and whose moral alignment relates to how you play the game. While the videogame enjoyed substantial commercial success in the UK and North America and was appraised in acclaimed videogame magazines such as EDGE, it was not so warmly welcomed by hardcore role-play gamers and fans of Peter Molyneux’s prior achievements. Their tastes had been sharpened by the trail of ‘teasers’ released by the developers,1 as well as Lionhead Director and lead designer Molyneux’s frequent mention of the revolution in gameworld design that Fable would offer. Extraordinarily, these frustrations motivated Molyneux to confront his audience in the gaming press, in an online documentary, and on his own Lionhead online forum. In answer to the frustrations of his gaming public, Molyneux writes:
    
    I
    
    There is something I have to say. And I have to say it because I love making games. When a game is in development, myself and the development teams I work with constantly encourage each other to think of the best features and the most ground-breaking design possible.
    Abstract: Gameworlds are the expression of a complex cultural and textual interaction, in which the foundational structures of the videogame solicit investment and belief from the player. Style arbitrates this solicitation, causing all aspects of the gameworld to conform to a common aesthetic line. This process is rarely so efficient however, and contemporary videogames such as Fable demonstrate the messiness of this ideological contract between the ambiguous roles of producers and consumers of videogames.
    
    153
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS
    However, what happens is that we strive to include absolutely everything we’ve ever dreamt of and, in my enthusiasm, I talk about it to anyone who’ll listen, mainly in press interviews. When I tell people about what we’re planning, I’m telling the truth, and people, of course, expect to see all the features I’ve mentioned. And when some of the most ambitious ideas get altered, redesigned or even dropped, people rightly want to know what happened to them.2
    
    In an unprecedented dialogue with consumers, Molyneux apologised for the underwhelming release of Fable, which was to be the videogame to simulate an unprecedented experience of exploratory player freedom. Trees would grow, the environment could be directly affected, and there would be new levels of player/environment interaction: in short, the gameworld would provide a heightened experience of realism and immersion. When these flights of fancy failed to materialise in the final retail product, the intentionality of the videogame designers was held to task, through the new system of direct accountability inadvertently created by Lionhead Studios’ own online forum. Molyneux and his production team made available their imaginary projections of what the Fable gameworld could be – and the company’s unspoken policy of transparency had backfired. Audiences had gauged the quality of this particular videogame against the imaginative projections of the lead developers alongside their own consumer expectation, and the online forum designed to extend the gameworld through discussion, mythmaking and speculation had instead served as a channel through which the Fable producers were directly accountable to the Fable consumers. As lead programmer Dene Carter and lead designer Simon Carter reflect, such criticism is representative of both the importance of imaginary preconceptions of the gameworld, and the close scrutiny brought to the videogame by those gamers who pay close attention to the creative possibilities of development.3 In his online post Molyneux goes on to write:
    If I have mentioned any feature in the past which, for whatever reason, didn’t make it as I described into Fable, I apologise. Every feature I have ever talked about WAS in development, but not all made it. Often the reason is that the feature did not make sense. For example, three years ago I talked about trees growing as time past. The team did code this but it took so much processor time (15 per cent) that the feature was not worth leaving in. That 15 per cent was much better spent on effects and combat. So nothing I said was groundless hype, but people expecting specific features which couldn’t be included were of course disappointed. If that’s you, I apologise. All I can say is that Fable is the best game we could possibly make, and that people really seem to love it.4
    
    As this essay will investigate, the control of ideologies of freedom that permeate the construction/consumption of gameworlds is a central concern for both developer and gamer alike. Here I specifically examine the role of style in this ideological equation. Two issues are immediately apparent: the
    
    154
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld utopian expectations of a significant proportion of gamers, and the way in which information that emerges during development creates an imaginary game against which the final production is measured. No matter how much Molyneux and the Carter twins justified the need to remove certain elements in order to improve the holistic experience of the game, certain gamers felt betrayed that their anticipated gameworld, an assemblage of imaginary negotiations and scant information sources, is not vindicated in the actual final Fable gameworld. This consumer anxiety is motivated in part by Molyneux’s rhetoric, and he admits that ‘I have come to realise that I should not talk about features too early [and] so I am considering not talking about games as early as I do’.5 This complex response to the Fable gameworld involving both developers and gamers provokes a series of associated questions regarding certain core principles at work: how are gameworlds constructed? What is (and what is not) an acceptable gameworld? What strategies do games employ to create a sense of completeness while never truly being so? Of particular interest to me are the textual strategies through which games developers rationalise both the material and imaginary limits of the worlds they create. While a videogame may suggest a spatial and temporal infinity in its worldview, nonetheless those edges are eventually encountered. While we can see the distant hilltop horizon or gaze out to sea in Fable, the restricted exploratory potential means that we can never reach that place. The imaginary investments of gamers overcome this material limitation, extending both positively and negatively beyond the limits of play, either to praise or criticise the potential gameworld. My study of gameworlds relates primarily to role-playing games and actionadventure videogame ‘genres’, in which exploratory play and interaction with non-player characters (NPCs) is of paramount importance. From a game studies perspective, the study of gameworlds presents us with a discursive point in which theories of representation and theories of play are consolidated. The overriding governance of interrelated conceptual principles of style, consistency and plausibility affect both representational and play aspects, be it as recognisable player/character (e.g. Eidos’ Tomb Raider, 1996) or controlling deity (e.g. Lionhead’s Black and White, 2001). In the first section I examine the way in which the gameworld – a term which is regularly used, and yet rarely qualified, in both industrial and academic circles – relates to the older broadly accepted idea of the diegetic fictional world. By association, existing theories on the fictional world help us to understand the under-theorised notion of the gameworld. Through recourse to certain literary and film discourses, I suggest that the place and function of style in gameworlds differs radically to conventional diegetic worlds of live-action film and television, and has more in keeping with
    
    155
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS animated film, comic books and the science fiction and fantasy genres across various media. I suggest that style, as a unifying determinant, creates the basis upon which the ideological effects of consistency and plausibility are constructed in videogames. In a second move, I look at the specific way in which the participatory act of play differentiates the gameworld from other associated forms of fictional world, with the noted exception of tabletop role-playing and war games such as White Dwarf’s Warhammer franchise. In the transition from a noninteractive to interactive experience of fictional worlds, what is gained and what is lost? And on reflection, as James Newman has noted, are videogames interactive at all?6 As such I must further explain developments in the play theory of game studies. Through an examination of Fable, I reflect on the ways in which modes of representation and play coincide to create a believable diegetic space.
    
    Fictional worlds
    Before we examine gameworlds, further enquiry must be made into certain recurrent terms and their uses. The theoretical use of ‘world’ in various media discourses is yoked to the creation of a foundational ‘reality’. To be in the ‘world’ of a novel, film or performance suggests an experience with strong continuities with aspects of our real-world experience; an experience that is immersive and all-encompassing, without the kinds of reflexive punctuation that would destroy its holistic effect. A fictional world, then, is on one level a realist discourse since it deals with the construction of a naturalised space to be disavowed, and which is ancillary to the noteworthy things that happen, and the events take place in that world. However, simultaneously one is able to look to the corners of that world and note that things are happening outside of the terms of a restricted narration, as part of a holistic ‘sphere of activity’.7 Moreover, the fictional world is simultaneously an episteme, a legitimating source to which discrete activity such as flora and fauna, cultures and societies connect; and yet the fictional world is itself a product of the overriding creative motivations and stylistic choices of the production team – it is both created and serves the role of creator. Fictional worlds are constructed, and are found primarily in the tradition of serialised or open fictions that rely on a core matrix of spaces, cultures, characters and places to unify them. The generalist, open access Wikepeida defines them thus: ‘[a] fictional universe is usually differentiated from the setting of, and the cosmology established by, ancient or modern legends, myths and religions, although there are countless fictional universes that draw upon such sources for inspiration’.8 Videogames are the most recent addition to this
    
    156
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld fictional mode. Role-playing games such as Fable rely heavily on the transposition of religious and mythological narratives in real-world cultures. In addition, role-playing videogames that are recognised for their immersive and expansive gameworlds (like the Square-Enix Final Fantasy and Nintendo Zelda franchises) rely heavily on serialisation, and on a complex intertextual knowledge base expanded as each new title is developed, played and contextualised by discerning fans. Though I limit my discussion to gameworlds, this distinction necessitates a further excursion into literary theory and film studies, alongside videogame and animation studies. And though I use literary criticism and traditional film theory, in a cross-disciplinary enterprise I shall be mapping their methods onto the videogame text. The various worldviews offered by new media have rarely been studied as such, and as a consequence, in an effort to enrich our conceptual understanding of videogames, I knowingly make lateral and sometimes tenuous leaps from established debates in studies of literature and live-action film.
    
    The place of style in gameworlds
    The stylistic basis of the gameworld and its accompanying ‘second-order realism’9 have evolved from the ongoing remediation of worldviews from preceding and contemporaneous media that share narrative themes, stylistic tropes, points of distribution and, at times, even audiences. Gameworlds incorporate the codes and conventions of animated, science-fiction, comicbook, televised and cinematic worlds. In its wholesale consolidation and expression of the media it encounters, the gameworld is exemplary of the contemporary notion of new media convergence. In his essay ‘Videogames as Remediated Animation’ Paul Ward outlines the complex way in which videogames can be understood through the lens of animation discourses, and he examines the migration of the stylistic conventions of animated movement from animated film to videogame.10 His analysis foregrounds Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of ‘remediation’ to describe the migration of the representational modality of movement from one media (animated film) to another (videogames) in a new media culture. He writes that ‘[r]ather than ‘new’ media simply replacing ‘old’ media they will, at any historical point, necessarily remediate previous media forms. By remediation they [Bolter and Grusin] mean the ways one medium appropriates the representational strategies of another …’ – in this case the remediation of animated movement from animated film to videogame – ‘… to further its transparency/immediacy but with the apparently contradictory consequence of foregrounding the process of mediation itself’.11 While Ward presents a qualitative analysis of remediated movement in which he notes
    
    157
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS
    
    Fig. 1: The Fable game screen. ©Microsoft/Lionhead/Big Blue Box Studios. [Image courtesy of www.planetlionhead.com]
    
    the loss of nuance and expression in videogame animation, I simply want to note that stylised animated movement contributes to the gameworld by remediating the illusionism and immersive strategies of the animated film. In the remediation from drawn animation to two-dimensional videogames such as Sonic the Hedgehog (SEGA, 1991), parallax-scrolling was carried over to give the illusion of depth-of-field. In computer animation, the remediation of three-dimensional modelling and texture mapping into contemporary videogames creates the same illusionist effect. As a remediation of a variety of diegetic strategies from a range of media, the gameworld seeks to produce as immersive an experience as possible, reflecting our real-world experience of reality as an interconnected continuity of spaces, times, and experiences; a seemingly borderless space that invites participation. Bolter and Grusin categorise this imperative as ‘immediacy’, the desire to erase the traces of mediation in the construction of a singularly immersive experience.12 However, the diegetic worlds in ‘new’ videogames can only be appreciated for their immediacy when juxtaposed against prior ‘old’ gameworlds. Ward notes a similar predicament in the assessment of a text’s realism: ‘We can only understand and conceptualise how “realistic” these forms are by reference to our actual lived reality – including, however, our experience of other media representations such as “realistic” live-action films’.13 Similarly the ‘worldliness’ of the gameworld is qualified through comparison with other media texts for whom the
    
    158
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld explicit criteria of ‘world’ is paramount, namely cult media. As such, videogames invite comparison with other so-called cult media, for instance the science fiction cinema franchise Star Trek. Importantly, the activism of audiences seen in studies of cult media fandom – specifically in the way they hold producers to task for taking the ‘world’ in a direction felt inappropriate – echoes the relation between the developers and gamers of Fable discussed here. Bolter and Grusin categorise this opposing intertextual tendency as ‘hypermediacy’, in which an emphasis on the new (in the case of gameworlds) necessitates recourse to a multiplicity of other texts against which the ‘newness’ of ‘new’ is qualified. This is not to be confused with the aesthetic hypermediacy of the game screen (such as that of Fable pictured on the facing page) with its multiple information sources relating health, wealth and location). I feel this contributes to the immediacy of the gameworld, since all information sources are pseudo-indexical representations of the players’ causal status within the gameworld. The information presented does not refer to an experience outside of the diegetic space of the videogame, and instead adds depth and complexity to the player avatar in visualised ways broadly analogous to our lived experience of geography, health and wealth. These abstractions are indexes to the reality of the gameworld and thus substantiate its plausibility as a possible world. To compare, the hypermediacy of the contemporary newsscreen refers to multiple non-continuous realities (sports, celebrity, news coverage, tv listings, stocks and shares) within one screen space, whereas the gamescreen information is connected to the singular reality of the played gameworld. Ward identifies that in both animated film and videogames representation does not depend on any indexical link with reality, save for certain uses of motion-capture technology in the animation of moving characters.14 Whereas live-action film captures reality and augments and transforms it (through production techniques) to create its fictional world, animated film and videogames create diegetic worlds from scratch. I concur with Ward that this distinction has limited currency given our accelerating media convergence and the blurring between animation/film/videogames. Both the conceptual and conspicuous place of style differs in the historical development of different media. Therefore the place of style in a stylistic history of comic books is not comparable to the place of style in a stylistic history of celluloid-based film.
    
    Cinematic and literary concepts of style
    In live-action film production, style is most commonly connected to the treatment of the pro-filmic reality through production design, casting etc.,
    
    159
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS and through subsequent post-production processes including editing, sound design and now digital manipulation. David Bordwell writes in his stylistic history of film of the formal nature of style:
    In the narrowest sense, I take style to be the film’s systematic and significant uses of techniques of the medium. Those techniques fall into broad domains: mise-en-scène (staging lighting, performance and setting); framing, focus, control and colour values, and other aspects of cinematography; editing; and sound. Style is, minimally, the texture of the films images and sounds, the result of the choices made by the filmmaker(s) in particular historical circumstances.15
    
    Filmmakers cannot, in principle, effect pro-filmic reality beyond a certain point, though I recognise that the digitisation of live-action film practices has undermined this. For the sake of distinction, in live-action filmmaking style does not extend to the total aesthetic reconfiguration of an actor’s physical body, the colour of the sky on the day of filming, and so on. Reality is manipulated, but not created: style is a principle guiding the aesthetic transformation of the pro-filmic ‘real world’. Erwin Panofsky summarises that
    [e]xcepting the very special case of the animated cartoon [and, I propose, the videogame], the movies organise material things and persons, not a neutral medium, into a composition that receives its style, and may even become fantastic or pretervoluntarily symbolic, not so much by interpretation in an artist’s mind as by the actual manipulation of physical objects and recording machinery.16
    
    In the wholly artificial worlds of videogames and animated film along with extending and legitimating cross-media franchises, style serves a different function (since no pro-filmic reality exists and every attribute of the text is artificially created), similar to the governing role style plays in certain literary forms and genres, in particular science fiction. Given styles often precede the release of the referent text in the form of toys, artwork, advertisements and so on. They also follow the text in fan art, dress styles and fan cultures such as cosplay, and of course imitation in other videogames. In his introductory essay ‘Reflections on Style in Science Fiction’17 George Slusser writes that
    [a] form like science fiction causes us to ask whether style can be the world as well, and SF18 worlds creations of style. This conjunction of style and world creation raises some interesting questions. Indeed, how can the “creation” of a fictional world be an act of style when style is traditionally seen as belonging to the realm of the individual rather than collective utterance?19
    
    Slusser notes that traditional prose – much like live-action film – relegates the place of style to the order of additional effects secondary to the predominant realism of syntactic rhetoric, comparable to the indexical ‘material’ realism of film photography. Literary style, in that traditional rhetorical
    
    160
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld sense, is the preserve of an individual author’s parole, or word choice, rather than the langue, or governing language of the world. While in live-action film, style extends, in equally traditional accounts,20 from the choice of what to put in front of the camera and how to do it, it is also disavowed as the foundation from which the spectrum of effects reified as ‘realism’, ‘diegesis’ and ‘fictional world’ emerge. This is not the case for the ‘new’ world of SF. Slusser notes that ‘… the primary function of SF and what gives it its generic identity: the creation not just of narrative worlds but of new narrative worlds. And these new worlds, conversely, reveal a new role for style.’21 The fantastical nature of the literary SF genre provokes a shift in both the place and function of style within the contexts of other literary modes: ‘[t]he stylistic utterance, then, defined in relation to this idea of world, can be little more than idiomatic, an exception to the rule. Despite these traditional expectations, however, style plays a significant role in SF world creation.’22 The wholly fictional world of most SF elicits the same remediation paradox as the diegetic worlds of animated film and videogames – to be uniquely immersive while at the same time understood and appreciated in the context of other comparable works.
    
    Consistency
    In the creation of fictional worlds what role does style serve common to SF literature, animated film, and videogames? This question brings us to the consequence of totalising stylisation shared by SF, animated worlds and gameworlds – the effect of dynamic consistency. Slusser cites the work of Richard Ohmann on the role and function of style in prose fiction. Importantly, Ohmann emphasises the way in which style should be considered experientially rather than rhetorically. Slusser writes that
    [h]e offers, in contrast to the old manuals of rhetoric, an expanded role for style. In statements such as “style is the hidden thoughts which accompany overt propositions,” Ohmann defines style as the point at which acts of thought separate from the hegemony of propositional or formal acts of language. To Ohmann, language is, ultimately, a system that permits the individual speaker to explore his or her natural world, making this latter a realm of experiential referents rather than simply one of signs and codes.23
    
    Style then becomes a means of constructing a world in which heuristic experiential navigations are emphasised over systems of signification, a point that clearly resonates with the topsy-turvy logic of the animated world and the interactive realm of the videogame, in which the experiential is at times the only means of sense-making.24 On a side note, this phenomenological approach has been emphasised elsewhere in film and animation studies, primarily by women.25 Slusser adds that
    [t]he ancillary role to which rhetoric has traditionally relegated style has in a
    
    161
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS
    sense hidden its true potential, which is in reality a means for individual speakers of a given language to explore and understand realities that lie on the fringes of, or just beyond, its syntactical limits.26
    
    In relation to film theory, similarly confining rhetoric can be found in the over-determination of photographic indexicality and its technological truth claim associated with writers such as Stanley Cavell and André Bazin. In Bazin’s thesis, the convergence of cinema technology is motivated by an idealised imaginary construct driven by pure immersion and complete realism, a ‘myth of total cinema’, in which the ‘facts’ of cinema’s representation of a singular reality override the apparent ‘fiction’ of non-indexical reproduction.27 As part of my call for an expanded theory of style in videogames (and to some degree animated film, SF, and comic books) I propose that style provides a means of governing a fictional space that operates at the limits or beyond our ‘real world’ conception. The emergent logic of the stylised fictional world provides a consistency reflective of the foundations that underpin the logic of our everyday experiences since ‘[t]he very idea of world implies a complex set of laws and relationships …’.28 Ward writes that: ‘A game … offers us a simple coherent world ... not complicated by references to anything but the most general sense of reality and the world of the game seems largely self-contained’.29 At points in which new elements are integrated into the gameworld they are conditioned by the predominant style of the host. This conditioning extends to games which permit players to submit modified material, as in the player portrait submissions of Black Isle/Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate series, in which players create portraits clearly following both in-game conventions and those of fantasy illustrators such as Frank Frazetta. In these sandpit realities where real-world complexities are pared down, style arbitrates the (albeit artificial) rules and regulations correspondent to our real-world experience. For instance: Newtonian physics (through game engines), evolutionary diversity in the natural world (through complex ‘bestiaries’ of creatures and monsters), and even consciousness (in artificial intelligence programming). In a gameworld which is fantastical and surreal (such as Fable) the gameplay, physics engine and aesthetic treatment of characters (Fig. 2) and environment all follow this implicit logic to create a consistent experience that (while radically different to our lived experience) has a cosmology which acts as the ‘temporary episteme’ Ohmann identifies in SF stylistics. In accordance with Ohmann’s account, I suggest that style, then, is a regulatory system of aesthetic and physical values spanning all textual elements of the fictional world. Style provokes immediacy, since it ensures a naturalistic consistency across all representational and non-repre-
    
    162
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld
    
    Fig. 2: Character concept artwork for Fable, featuring clearly styled costume design. ©Microsoft/Lionhead/Big Blue Box Studios. [Image courtesy of www.planetlionhead.com]
    
    sentational elements within the text. At the beginning of many role-playing games (an excellent example, aside from Fable, being The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker), when the player/character is in his ‘hometown’, his costume, his tone of skin, his dialect, his accoutrements, all pertain to a governing stylistic principle that ceaselessly promotes the solidarity of all constituent aspects. As the game progresses and the player/character moves further and further from his homestead, the stylistic juxtaposition of player with a consistent-yet-different environment (for instance rural character in urban environment) serves to emphasise the geographic worldliness through a caricature of the ubiquitous real-world experience of cultural solidarity and cultural difference. At this point you might be thinking ‘why is he describing as style what I know to be generally referred to as design?’ This is understandable since a videogame designer’s role involves conceiving of a consistent diegetic space. In a theoretical context however I feel the term design to be insufficient in describing the continuities between animated film, live-action, literature and videogames. I use style then as a synonym for design as it is used in videogame development, and in recognition of its remediation between various media. To recall, in SF Ohmann suggests that style is an episteme, and not simply a rhetorical strategy. Style becomes an invisible unifying logic that creates an effect of immediacy; everything looking and functioning in a perceived rightful place, cultural history evidenced in the artefacts, architectures and design practices of this (albeit constructed) world. As an episteme, style assumes the function of a myth of origin, a primordial point to which everything is linked in the fictional world. For the fact that the buildings share aesthetic principles with the dress codes, the treatment of physics, and non-player characters – that there is a degree of homogeneity when right-
    
    163
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS fully there should be heterogeneity – style as ‘surface level expression’ is representative of an assumed cultural depth and a utopia of cultural solidarity common to the majority of fictional worlds across a variety of media.30 In the gameworld successful consistency relates to the extent that a guiding principle of style has penetrated and unified all corners of games aesthetic (both representational and non-representational) aspects. From this assertion it is clear that style therefore serves both a formal aesthetic and ideological function. By creating a fictional world with its own internal logic videogame developers can construct experiential expressions to be associated with particular gaming brands. This was most pronounced in the console wars of the mid-eighties to early 1990s between SEGA and Nintendo, whose in-house videogame franchises created stylised worlds with distinct ideologies rehearsing, with each play experience, a projected company image. The cyberpunk chic of SEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage and Turrican series presented a clearly different set of aesthetic and cultural values to the ‘cutesy’ chaos of Nintendo’s Super Mario World, Kirby’s Dreamland and Pop n’ Twinbee. When looking at Fable we can note the ways in which the various stylised attributes contribute to the production of an ideological effect. While these are many and varied, and would warrant further study, I want to consider the ideology of player freedom that is the mainstay of developer rhetoric and consumer expectation, and that seems to be so central to both the praise and criticism levelled at Fable.
    
    Plausibility, and playing gameworlds
    In the previous section I examined gameworlds as primarily representational phenomena through an analysis of the role of style. In this section I shall foreground the role of play in the experience of gameworlds. In a cinematic, televised or literary experience the construction of a diegetic sense of world extends from a predominantly non-interactive narrative text. As discerning readers, we consume the action as it unfolds before us, negotiating the layers of information that constitute a believable diegesis. Our experience is individuated through what Martin Barker has called prefiguration, the preformed judgements and experiential negotiations that precede the media experience, which are brought to the text in the act of interpretation.31 Mark J. P. Wolf identifies the changes brought about by interactivity to the diegetic fictional world:
    By the time the video game appeared, the concept of the diegetic world was already familiar to most audiences through film and television. The video game used much of the visual grammar from these media in the construction of its worlds, and was able to build upon established conventions (such as conservation of screen direction when cutting from one space to another) through
    
    164
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld
    added participatory elements. Some of these elements, such as navigation and interaction, place certain limits on to the diegetic world that are unlike those found in film or television. And as with film, the development of the diegetic world did not occur in a smooth, straightforward fashion.32
    
    The non-interactive apparatus remains unaffected, at the discrete level, by our experience of it. Conventionally speaking, written prose is not alterable, though we can chose not to read. Likewise we can choose to leave the cinema, pause the DVD or video, change the channel – the content will remain the same. Newman writes, ‘In the Tomb Raider movie, I can go to sleep or walk out and Lara will still save the day. But the game needs me ... The game is nothing without the player.’33 However I recognise one can argue that, through the circuitous system of cultural production and consumption, the fashions, twists and turns of collective audience taste direct the development of popular media.34 Regarding interactivity, videogames present a substantial change in the history of mechanical and electronic media experience.35 In videogames, play is the central activity through which meaning is produced. Play dominates the hierarchy of the different modalities found in videogame experiences: it individuates videogames from other media and as such is their defining characteristic. While games contain systems of representation and narrative comparable to prior media forms, emulating cinematic and literary modalities,36 the simulation-oriented activity of play is the primary agent through which these other processes are expressed. That is not to say that such modes of communication do not exist, but rather that they are expressed through the moderating and modifying activity of play. I want to make clear that while discussing play, I do not want to overstress its place to the detriment of other ways of studying videogames. As I have said, a study of gameworlds incorporates both theories of representation and theories of play. Given the centrality of play, the construction of gameworlds requires an increased level of stylised ‘attention to detail’ to counter and negotiate the inevitability that players reach a point where they encounter the limits of the gameworld; a limited repertoire of moves, a finite exploration space, glitches and cheats. As such, videogames invite considerable testing and scrutiny by consumers as a consequence of the interactive nature of play. In a similar way, interactive arts such as installation often suffer from participants focussing on play to the detriment of the production of meaning intended by the work. The pleasures of the interface override the disclosure of the artist’s intent. Cinematic composition and editing direct the attention of the viewer to focal points and centres of action, as do syntagmatic structures in literature. In videogames, players direct their attention through play, and while the
    
    165
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS game is furthered through a set series of ‘core’ interactions, nonetheless the player is (predominantly) in command of the ways in which that is approached. For instance, standing in a corner is a viable option, as is running in a circle, or devoting hours to clearing an area of enemy characters. Newman writes, ‘… without a player, “Lara” just stands there’.37 While these activities are often unproductive in terms of narrative flow or game completion, they are certainly available to the player and highlight the way in which play constitutes a predominant norm defined by the average gamer; and a peripheral ‘other’, associated with the extremes of play proficiency, is often referred to as the ‘hardcore’ gamer.38 In his review of game and play theory dating back to the 1950s, Newman writes that ‘[t]he game is a voluntary activity, engagement with which represents an end in itself rather than operating as a means to an end; game play is its own reward and is clearly distinguished from ordinary life’.39 Play therefore generates the same effect of self-containment and immediacy found in the way style creates coherence across the representational (and certain non-representational) aspects of the gameworld. The played gameworld remediates both our real world experience of childhood exploration and simultaneously our experience of games played in relation to certain sets of rules. Though ‘distinguished from ordinary life’ such worlds are dependent on the plausible correspondence to real-world laws as a system of stylising parameters through which players and audiences can negotiate the fantasy. Ward writes that gameworlds
    … offer more compelling gameplay if certain rules (such as those of gravity and the solidity of objects) are obeyed up to a point even when characters are performing actions that seem unbelievable by real-world standards. A certain degree of plausibility at one level helps to emphasise the pleasure of engaging in vicarious activities that go beyond the bounds of normal physical capability.40
    
    Even in a heavily abstracted game like Super Bomberman which nonetheless features characters and environments, the remediation of the real-world rules of board games like ‘chess’ and ‘connect four’ into the gameworld provide a tacit system through which players can rationalise and negotiate the gaming experience. The experience of another prior form of game authenticates through subtle continuities of form and structure of play. Frauenfelder (quoted in Ward) writes that ‘[a]lthough game developers like to boast about the realism of the experiences they create, they’re actually talking about making sure that the world within a game, which may be entirely unlike the one we live in, is consistent and accessible’.41 Newman writes that the play theorist Roger Caillois ‘distinguishes between paidea and ludus referring to games with simple and complex rules respectively.32 As such skipping a rope (paidea) can be distinguished from more
    
    166
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld complex games such as bridge or football (ludus).’43 Therefore, the vast majority of play activity within a gameworld can be placed on a continuum between simplicity (paidea) and complexity (ludus). It is important to stress that a durable use of these categories necessitates placing them on such a continuum, noting all the shades of grey between the poles. Gonzalo Frasca has added that we can further distinguish between paidea and ludus through the recognition of the role of outcome in the two categories.44 As Newman notes, ludus is characterised by an effort to achieve an objective, while paidea is not. Frasca, quoted in Newman, writes that paidea is ‘physical or mental activity which has no immediate useful objective, nor defined objective, and whose only reason to be is based in the pleasure experienced by the player ... . Ludus, therefore, requires reference to an external suite of rules where paidea is understood and delimited by the player’.45 Caillois’ notion of ludus has clear associations with the idea of style as I have outlined it, since style acts like a ‘suite of rules’ governing all aspects of the gameworld. Play is then by association subject to the overarching rule of style, since stylisation touches all aspects of the constructed gameworld. The range of abilities, speed and strength of the player/character in a given point in the game is contemporaneous with the stylised world in which s/he resides. An expanding world, opened up through exploration and narrative exposition, is echoed by an expanded repertoire of play abilities. As a consequence, the return of an ‘expanded’ character (with the abilities and accoutrements of later areas of the gameworld) to an early area of the gameworld has an implicit experiential meaningfulness; a dramatic quality extending from the juxtaposition of stylistic complexity and simplicity. Given the predominance of the rule of style in all aspects of the gameworld, I concur with Frasca’s suspicion that we can never be truly free from rules, per se, in videogame worlds; there is no state of utopian pure paidea. Elsewhere, Newman has made key observations which are integral to the way play distinguishes the gameworlds from its animated, cinematic and literary predecessors. To summarise, in those non-interactive diegetic worlds the protagonist character is identified as separate to the audience participant. No matter the degree of identification, the majority of audiences recognised the status of the filmed subject as ‘other’. In videogames, a radically different system of subject association is constructed, in which players partially collapse on-screen characters with the first-person referent ‘I’, and (in an admittedly simplistic account) games characters become a surrogate second self. As Newman notes, this has a substantial consequence on the way in which we negotiate the gameworld as a diegetic space.46 Further, in his argument Newman suggests that those players actually playing the game, which he terms ‘on-line’ players (not including the audience of secondary players who do not control but instead spectate) do
    
    167
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS not distinguish between character and world, and instead understand ‘character’ to be ‘… a complex of all the action contained within the gameworld … The situation and action within the gameworld are inexorably bound into the players conception of the experience of being within that gameworld’.47 I suggest style is integral to the creation of this holistic character complex.
    
    Conclusion: ‘imagining what freedom means’
    At the core of the gameworld is a dichotomy. For a belief in player freedom to be solicited, then the restrictions of the rule of style must come into play to create necessary senses of consistency and plausibility. Freedom then becomes what one can do within overarching constraints. The imagination of the videogame developer recognises these conditions, while the imagination of the gamer largely does not. For the gamer the concept of freedom, like Bazin’s myth of total cinema, constantly exceeds that of the developer since it is not constrained by the hum-drum of pragmatic technological development. It is a driving imperative in the popular consumption of videogames, and is (like any sales pitch) exaggerated by the developers, publishers and advertisers of videogames. Fable’s Dene and Simon Carter note that what developers and gamers imagine freedom to mean is central to either the success or failure of a videogame. If a videogame exceeds the imagined preconception of freedom held by gamers then it is sure to be a success, if it falls short, then it is sure to fail.48 Paidea – Caillois’ experiential play without restriction – might be considered analogous to Bazin’s imagined total cinema. Certainly, the freedom to explore gameworlds without restriction is the mainstay of tradeshow demonstrations of the latest roleplaying videogame. One telling example from Fable relates to the inclusion of homosexuality among the repertoire of choices available to the player (Fig. 3). NPCs exhibit growing affection to the player/character as the videogame progresses and the player/character is able to seduce whom he chooses, man or woman. This feature represents a significant move in videogames culture, away from the simulation-based dolls-house sexuality of The Sims to a main protagonist in whom gamers can realise more complex structures of desire. However, here we encounter a rupture in the consistency of the gameworld, since the videogame erroneously refers to your same-sex male spouse as ‘wife’. Moreover, to fully explore the gameworld at one point the player must marry Lady Grey, the head of the largest town Bowerstone. This act revises the sexuality of the player/character to bisexual; the fullest exploration of the apparent freedom of the gameworld leads to a narrative restriction contrary to the defining choices the gamer had made. While this particular contradiction is highlighted by my own association and frustra-
    
    168
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld
    
    Fig. 3: Gay seduction in Fable. ©Microsoft/Lionhead/Big Blue Box Studios. [Image courtesy of www.planetlionhead.com]
    
    tion with Fable, it is representative of the broad criticisms of gameworlds gamers recurrently make. It is a hole in the consistency. Revealingly, gamers criticise holes in the ideology of the gameworld and the associated lack of consistency. Illusionism is not something to be deconstructed as in the radical cinema and associated film theory of the 1960s and 1970s, but instead something to be cultivated and extended. This tells us something of the socio-cultural role games are playing in the domestic sphere, perhaps as an escapist fantasy, or space for legitimate experimentation with subjectivity not permitted in real-world social structures. In this essay I hope to have highlighted some preliminary ideas regarding the role of style and discourses of consistency and plausibility in the gameworld. The immediacy of paidea and the ideological discourse of freedom are central to the role-playing gameworld. A dialectical appreciation of such freedom however necessitates a foundational rule set. What is paidea without ludus, immediacy without hypermediacy, and freedom without constraint? This dichotomous realisation is overshadowed by the rule of stylisation, a temporary episteme within which we can experientially negotiate our artificial realities.
    Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Seth Giddings, Tanya Krzywinska, Bob Rehak and Paul Ward for their invaluable suggestions during the writing of this essay.
    
    169
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS
    
    Notes
    1. For tradeshow previews and TV trailers see: http://www.gametrailers.com 2. Available online at: http://www.lionhead.com/boards/nonflash.html 3. Fable: The Big Feature: In-depth with Lionhead and Big Blue Box, production documentary, available online at: http://www.kikizo.com 4. Available online at: http://www.lionhead.com/boards/nonflash.html 5. Ibid. 6. James Newman, ‘The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in videogames’, Game Studies vol. 2, no. 1 (2002), available online at: http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/newman/ 7. Oxford English Dictionary. 8. ‘Fictional universe’, Wikipedia, the free http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_universe encyclopaedia, available online at
    
    9. Andy Darley, ‘Second-order realism and post-modernist aesthetics in computer animation’, Jayne Pilling (ed.), A Reader in Animation Studies (London: John Libbey, 1997): 16–24. 10. Paul Ward, ‘Videogames as Remediated Animation’, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (eds), Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (London: Wallflower Press, 2002): 122–135. 11. Ibid., 128. 12. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (London: MIT Press, 1999): 21–31. 13. Paul Ward, ‘Videogames as Remediated Animation’: 132. 14. cf. Stephen Prince, ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’, Film Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (1996): 27–37; Warren Buckland, ‘Between science fact and science fiction: Spielberg’s dinosaurs, possible worlds, and the new aesthetic realism’, Screen vol. 40, no. 2 (1999): 177–192. 15. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (London: Harvard University Press, 1997): 4. 16. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’, Angela Dalle Vacche (ed), The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (London: Rutgers University Press, 2003): 69–84. 17. George Slusser, ‘Reflections on Style in Science Fiction’, George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (eds), Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds (London: University of Georgia Press, 1992): 2–23. 18. ‘SF’ is an acronym for Science Fiction. 19. George Slusser, ‘Reflections on Style in Science Fiction’: 3. 20. cf. Ralph Stevenson and Guy Phelps, The Cinema as Art (London: Penguin, 1989, revised 2nd edn); Victor F. Perkins, Film as Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993); Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979, enlarged edition). 21. George Slusser, ‘Reflections on Style in Science Fiction’: 3. 22. Ibid., 3. One can even speculate that in the late-nineteenth century animation remediated both the style and worldview of the science fiction literature of the time, evidenced in the multimedia works of Windsor McCay and Emile Cohl, as both textual forms enjoyed a degree of popularity in the Victorian culture of curiosities. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. This is particularly true of the burgeoning imported games market. While many Japanese games are illegible to their western audience, the audiences’ tacit knowledge of videogames in general allows for an experiential navigation of the gameworld. 25. For a summary discussion see Suzanne Buchan, ‘Animation Spectatorship: The Quay Brothers’
    
    170
    
    Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld
    Animated “Worlds”’ Entertext vol. 4, no. 1 (2004): 97–125. available online at: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/faculty/arts/EnterText/4_1/buchan.pdf 26. George Slusser, ‘Reflections on Style in Science Fiction’: 6. 27. André Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, What is Cinema? Volume 1 (London: University of California Press, 1967): 17–22. 28. George Slusser, ‘Reflections on Style in Science Fiction’: 3. 29. Ward, ‘Videogames as Remediated Animation’: 123, my emphasis. 30. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (London: Harvard University Press, 1995): 74–86. 31. Martin Barker, ‘The Lord of the Rings Project’, paper presented at the Association for Research into Popular Fictions annual conference, Liverpool John Moores University, 20–21 November, 2004. 32. Mark J. P. Wolf, ‘Narrative in the Video Game’, Mark J. P. Wolf (ed), The Medium of the Video Game (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001): 94, for a brief history of diegetic and non-diegetic aspects in videogames see pages 93–111. 33. Newman, ‘The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame’ Game Studies vol. 2, no. 1 (2002), available online at: http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/newman/ 34. cf. John Fiske, ‘Commodities and Culture’, Understanding Popular Culture (London, Routledge: 1989): 23–48; Joanne Hollows, ‘Mass Culture Theory and Political Economy’, Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovitch (eds), Approaches to Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995): 15–36. 35. The reason I delineate mechanical and electronic media relates to the interactive and participatory modes of certain classical forms such as baroque sculpture, in which viewers are provoked to circle the work in order to ascertain its implicit narrativity. For further examples, see: Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (London: MIT Press, 2004). 36. For an analysis of the relation between cinema and videogames see: Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (eds), Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (London: Wallflower, 2002). For literature and videogames see: Barry Atkins, More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (London: MIT Press, 1997); Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (London, John Hopkins University Press: 2001). 37. Newman, ‘The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame’, available online at: http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/newman/ 38. David Surman, ‘Downtime and Online Debate in Hardcore Gamer Culture’, paper presented at the Association for Research into Popular Fictions annual conference, Liverpool John Moores University, 20–21 November 2004. 39. James Newman, Videogames (London: Routledge, 2004): 18. 40. Ward, ‘Videogames as Remediated Animation’: 126. 41. Ibid., 127. 42. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 43. Newman, Videogames: 19, my italics. 44. Gonzalo Frasca, ‘Introduction to Ludology’, Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (eds), The Video Game Theory Reader (London: Routledge, 2003): 221–236. 45. Ibid., 19–20, my italics. 46. Newman, ‘The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame’, available online at: http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/newman/ 47. Ibid. 48. Fable: The Big Feature: In-depth with Lionhead and Big Blue Box, production documentary, available online at: http://www.kikizo.com
    
    171
    
    ANIMATED WORLDS
    
    David Surman is lecturer in computer games design and animation at the Newport School of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales, Newport. He is currently working on book chapters for an anthology of videogame criticism, and a new volume of interdisciplinary critical theory and his recent publications include ‘CGI animation: pseudo-realism, perception, possible worlds’ (www.gamasutra.com) and ‘animated caricature: notes on Superman 1941–1943’ (Entertext). He is Reviews Editor for the peer-reviewed Animation. An Interdisciplinary Journal, and an editorial board member for the USC peer-reviewed journal of contemporary game studies, Games and Culture. His research remains focused on understanding the production and reception of ‘fictional worlds’ across a variety of media, in both theory and practice.
    
    172

Add Comment

To add a comment, you need to login or signup (you can signup without leaving this page)