This presentation was delivered at the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in İstanbul.

1. Altuğ Işığan The Open and the Closed: Notes on Game Narrativity Presented at theInternational Symposium on Electronic Arts(ISEA) Istanbul, September 16 2011

2. Eco, 1962 Almost 50 years ago, just around the times when engineer Stephen Russell created and ran the game Spacewar! on a car-sized PDP-1 computer at the MIT labs, Umberto Eco published his book The Open Work (1962).

4. They invite readers not only to interprete the text, but to play an active role in their configuration as texts.

6. George Perec – Life, A User’s Manual

7. Raymond Queneau – A Hundred Billion Poems

8. Ludology’s Take Classic Ludology seems to be convinced that only games possess this quality of emergence. To them, “narrative” (which they perceive as being of a “scripted” nature) is against the emergent nature of games

9. Ludology’s Take For example Jesper Juul says that when you apply narrative to games, you destroy their emergent character and they turn into games of progession (2002). However, Eco’s work clearly shows that narrativity and emergence aren’t mutually exclusive

11. Can we speak of emergence as being the nature of only certain media, but not others?

14. 1 - The need to explain patterns in emergentbehavior

17. Conflict This is actually a very good definition of the notion of conflict in classical drama theory.

18. Necessity Technically speaking, any character who is trying to solve a conflict is subject to necessity. Necessity addresses the fact that there is a force at play that keeps the character on search for a optimal solution to the conflict that she is facing

19. Necessity  In other words, necessity renders “logical” and meaningful only certain types of actions. In the light of necessity, only a limited part of the available possibility space is of use; the useless parts will probably never be discovered.

20. Necessity This means that even if we could, we do not simply roam freely in the open world Our actions are rather motivated and telic This goal-orientedness causes patterns to emerge in the ongoing emergent behavior

21. Necessity Drama Theory addresses these issues under the topic of motivation  “Why can the character not simply walk away and ignore the challenge?”  When arriving at decision nodes, why does the character chose what is good for the story?

22. Sample Game To illustrate the point, let’s have a look at a formal game with emergent qualities ... TETRIS!

24. But if we attempt to change this algorithmic fate, we draw a curve!

25. Tetris The more we try, the more curves we create!

27. Yet to me the non-linearity that emerges here is rather limited

28. I see in all this some quite linear drama!

31. Aperiodic Behavior and Attractors In aperodic behavior, there is a single attractor that structures emergent behavior so that it takes similar shapes while on its way to a predictable end.

32. Necessity as Attractor We could say that in most video games necessity works like an attractor Hence emergent player behavior in these games tends to display a pattern As a diagram it would look like...

33. Patterned Emergent Behavior

34. Linearity With Many Faces To make the inherent “linearity” even more visible, think of a flowchart-like presentation

35. Linearity With Many Faces NarratologistBremondput it evensimpler in his studies on necessityandstorylogicthat he conducted in the 1960s.

37. Hence I dare to call these kind of emergent games pseudo-non-linear.

38. Despite their openness, these games are built around relatively narrow possibility space and an essentiallylinear premise.

40. The Open and the Closed

43. In other words, the designer has to craft and maintain the conditions of emergence

46. Bothlinearity and non-linearity are design achievements, depending on authorial skill and intention.

47. The medium won’t do the work for us, because it does not know linearity or non-linearity.

48. It just makes itself available to our vision and it’s up to us to realize that vision by bending the medium as to serve our needs

49. If we manage to keep it linear, it will be linear

50. If we manage to keep it non-linear, it will be non-linear

52. References Eco U. (1987) Açık Yapıt (çev. Yakup Şahan). İstanbul: Kabalcı. Juul J. (2002). “The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression”. http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/openandtheclosed.html Juul J. (2001). “A History of the Computer Game”. http://www.jesperjuul.net/thesis/2-historyofthecomputergame.html Sardar Z. and Abrams I. (2010). Kaos: Düzensizlikteki Düzeni Anlamak İçin Çizgibilim. İstanbul: NTV Yayınları.