Digital Zombies, Undead Stories

Narrative Emergence and Videogames

Lawrence May

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501363535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Through analysis of three case study videogames – Left 4 Dead 2, DayZ and Minecraft – and their online player communities, Digital Zombies, Undead Stories develops a framework for understanding how collective gameplay generates experiences of narrative, as well as the narrative dimensions of players' creative activity on social media platforms. Narrative emergence is addressed as a powerful form of player experience in multiplayer games, one which makes individual games' boundaries and meanings fluid and negotiable by players. The phenomenon is also shown to be recursive in nature, shaping individual and collective understandings of videogame texts over time. Digital Zombies, Undead Stories focuses on games featuring zombies as central antagonists. The recurrent figure of the videogame zombie, which mediates between chaos and rule-driven predictability, serves as both metaphor and mascot for narrative emergence. This book argues that in the zombie genre, emergent experiences are at the heart of narrative experiences for players, and more broadly demonstrates the potential for the phenomenon to be understood as a fundamental part of everyday play experiences across genres.

1

Introduction

Undead stories

At social gatherings of Parisian surrealist artists and writers in the 1920s, a number of collective parlour games were developed and defined – notable among them the cadavre exquis (‘exquisite corpse’). Initially named jeu des petits papiers, the game typically involved four or more players, sheets of paper and tools for writing (and later for drawing). Words, phrases and sentences were written by participants and contributed to a hat to be randomly drawn and placed together to constitute unanticipated phrases and stories.¹ The game earned its more memorable name after the group’s enthusiastic reception of the first sentence to be produced by this process of automatic writing: ‘cadavre – exquis – boira – le vin – nouveau’ (‘the exquisite corpse will drink new wine’). For André Breton, the founder of surrealism, the merit of this system of verbal construction ‘was that they could not have been the fruit of one mind and that they were an infallible means of bypassing the critical faculty’.² By combining simple rules, textual inputs and the collective interactions of the players, the machinations of chance allowed narrative meaning to emerge in surprising ways, freed of the apparent limitations of individual motivations, perceptions and creative outlooks.

The corporeal connection was deepened in the visual variant of the game, in which each participant would, one by one, draw part of an image, fold the sheet of paper to conceal their design, and hand it off to the next player to make a similarly mysterious contribution. Guided by a simple compositional rule that participants’ efforts were to mirror the anatomical structure of the body (the first participant was required to draw the equivalent of a head, the second the upper torso, shoulders and arms, the third the mid-section, etc.), players would work to generate drawn corpses which were often fantastic, bizarre and beautiful in nature. Humans, animals, plants, inanimate machinery and abstract constructions would share limbs and sections of their bodies to make up the final, unanticipated assemblies. These were (and still are when drawn by participants today) undead stories of sorts – creating impossible corpses that could not find life in our biological worlds but are reanimated by fragments and combinations of user-generated story and jocularity. The composite figures, phrases and stories drew on the ‘pooling of mental resources and the chance associations of words or images’ in order to deliberately disrupt normal expectations of discourse and ‘to release clichés and automatisms of speech, by producing singular analogies and unprecedented association’.³ By drawing upon a simple rule structure, embracing chance and the variability of group collaboration in a context of interactive creativity, both the verbal and the visual versions of the cadavre exquis were games that generated early examples of narrative emergence.

‘Emergent’ game narratives are those that ‘are not prestructured or preprogrammed, taking shape through the game play’ and in which elements of the game’s design enable ‘the story-constructing activity of players’.⁴ Such emergence is possible in videogames because they function as complex systems and the interactions players have with these systems elicit ‘unpredictable narrative experiences’ unique to each player.⁵ In short, this phenomenon describes narrative content and experiences that develop organically through the highly variable processes and possibilities of play. This narrative–generative potential of gaming systems can contribute to players’ individual interpretations of game events and experiences and in turn inform their interaction with the text and their subsequent gameplay decisions. The focus of this book is on these moments of narrative meaning that game systems and players generate together in reaction to unpredictable experiences in multiplayer gameplay, either in the absence of or in addition to explicit, embedded narrative cues.

My opening connection to the evening parlour activity of the surrealists deliberately gestures towards the figure of another fantastic, grotesque corpse – the undead zombie. The use and experience of emergent narrative in the zombie genre of multiplayer videogames is distinctive and integral. Where emergent experiences in other game modes and genres are often coincidental, piecemeal and superficial (in the sense that they may add a layer of emergently generated story experience, or modify part of a game experience), in the zombie genre, emergence is located at the core of texts as a primary engine for multi-user narrative experiences. This is no coincidence, and it reflects the fundamentally emergent nature of both the fictional worlds and the narrative structures of zombie media outside of videogames.

‘Emergent narrative’ as a term has been subject to criticism in scholarship for its frequently vague application to games and a lack of conceptual completeness or cohesion. This reflects the phenomenon’s status as a secondary or non-essential element of narrative design in many of the games discussed in existing literature. The combination of the zombie genre and the multiplayer mode gives us the chance to observe emergent narrative in a form where it has been granted textual primacy. By highlighting this genre, I intend to develop a more comprehensive and cohesive description of the emergent narrative phenomenon, its drivers, its functions and its outcomes, both for narrative and for player experience. Zombie videogames speak back to the wider genre of which they are a partial product, enacting and intensifying already present emergent tendencies. They also speak to videogaming more broadly, demonstrating the potential for emergent narrative to drive videogames rather than augment them.

The emergent process enables the individuals who play such games to participate in ongoing renegotiations of the narrative meanings of videogame texts. Users are able to participate in a potentially cyclical process which comprises play, experience of narrative emergence, the creative production of narrative artefacts, sharing artefacts to online player communities and consuming such artefacts in order to shape and guide future play experience (and consequent possibilities for narrative emergence). I also argue in this book that multiplayer zombie videogames, and the social and textual practices of player communities, illustrate a generative process of emergent narrative that is particular to the multi-user modality.

In order to develop this more detailed understanding of narrative emergence, I seek to find what leads to the player’s experience of emergent narrative, how this narrative meaning is received and negotiated and how players capture, articulate and process such meaning. The production and consumption of emergent narrative by players, in their role as part of videogames’ textual machines, is not merely possible or likely but deeply embedded in common, everyday gaming rituals and activities. In attempting to define the boundaries of the generative phenomenon inside multi-user contexts, I work to demonstrate that it is an experience frequently encountered by players across a number of communities with a wide variety of narrative and ludic consequences for them.

Existing literature is emphatic in its demonstration of the notion that digital games and their players are able to enter into a sort of cybernetic relationship where interaction with the videogame not only enacts textual meaning but, to varying degrees, defines it. It is also evident that scholarly consensus sees players naturally and easily taking their participatory role in this relationship. I seek to uncover why players so readily engage in these productive partnerships with videogames, and to consider the self-reflexive nature of such engagement. Emergent narrative appears to allow players to ‘fill in the gaps’ in multiplayer game worlds that are defined more by the mechanics of their systems and rulesets than they are filled with accessible, embedded narrative cues. I explore the extent to which players are active and deliberate in their embrace of emergent narrative as a means to explain what they have experienced in an interactive environment as well as to inform their subsequent gameplay decisions and actions.

I also query the role of social activity in players’ motivation to produce and consume narrative in emergent ways. While moments of emergent narrative might simply be internalized by players to inform their own gameplay behaviours, in other instances they might be reproduced and shared as artefacts for others to consume or respond to. Videogame players sometimes draw on the games they play to construct stories and narratives, with gameplay in this way becoming ‘a resource for social performances’⁶ and ‘the virtual material from which shared identities and realities are brought forth into life and sustained over time’.⁷ Moments of emergent meaning are reproduced and shared in artefactual narrative forms outside players’ own minds, in order to facilitate social relationships, community building or cultural production, both during and away from multiplayer gaming sessions.

I unpack, to the extent that it is possible from the evidence I refer to, the interrelationships between different players’ emergent fragments of narrative during sessions of multi-user gameplay (which can range in length from mere minutes to many hours). I examine ways the social connections and functions that are woven through multiplayer game modes not only help generate individual interpretations of textual experience and meaning but might also offer immediate opportunities for meaning to be shared, refined or challenged. To explore these types of player experiences, I examine practices of cultural production and dialogue in online communities that are associated with the book’s case study videogames (which I detail in the following section of this chapter). A productive relationship exists between the two player realms, through which the meaning of individuals’ emergent experiences is further negotiated and defined by the larger communities and text-specific cultures that surround the game text.

Returning to the ingame experience, I also show that, over multiple gaming sessions, emergent narrative can carry with it cumulative meaning. This demonstrates the mutable, ongoing nature of game texts at an extreme, with a long ‘tail’ of generative activity and meaning following individual players and communities as they spend weeks, months and years playing their games.

Methodology

To explore and understand narrative emergence, I address three case study videogames in this book: DayZ,⁸ Left 4 Dead 2⁹ and Minecraft.¹⁰ The term ‘case study’ is used in this book to encapsulate more than just the analysis of the videogame texts in question (as they exist as discrete objects of software installed on users’ computers or gaming consoles) and also includes elements of the online player communities that exist surrounding each game and the textual negotiations that occur in these threshold spaces. Observation and analysis of community practices and online narrative artefacts form the most substantial qualitative dataset for my analysis. I define ‘narrative artefacts’ as the wide range of narrative and media objects users can share with online communities by submitting (either directly as embedded media, or hyperlinked within posts) to online fora and web 2.0 social platforms (specific examples are detailed shortly). My own gameplay supplements this data source and provides textual and structural readings of the case study videogames and self-reflective impressions of the potential operation of the emergent narrative phenomenon.

Two of the case study texts come with important considerations to note, which relate to the fluidity of their status as discrete ‘texts’. In the case of Minecraft, its status as a game under ongoing development must be noted. Released in 2011, the game has received continual and frequent updates and still does today. Some of these are minor – technical tweaks – while others are more profound adjustments to the game’s rules or practices of play. The artefacts gathered and analysed stretch across the years of the game’s existence, and as such, inconsistencies and contradictions between individual users’ time-bound experiences of play are legible. Likewise, DayZ is a game lacking fixity as a text. Released initially as an unofficial modification for another game – ARMA II¹¹ – DayZ was subsequently developed as a separate, standalone game with a dedicated development team and commercial support. In terms of the textual, ludic and programmed nature of the two videogames, there is contiguity between the modification and the standalone product. The discourse of players and staff involved in the games’ design treats the two texts as elements of a single, unified development process. As with Minecraft, the distinctions between these two phases of development are, however, occasionally visible in the artefacts I discuss. In the case of Minecraft and DayZ, the distinctions between particular versions are collapsed, as the focus of the discussions in this volume are the ways in which game elements and player practices combine to generate narrative emergence in different moments of play, and such analysis does not necessarily require a fixed and stable text to address.

My first approach to data collection responds both to the position of videogames as experient...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Stories of the undead
• 3 Rules of emergence (and the emergence of rules)
• 4 Familiar storytelling and popular memories
• 5 Making, breaking and bending rules at the textual margins
• 6 Unstable media, infectious stories and migratory rules
• 7 Delayed apocalypse, deliberate design
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright