Defining Narrative

I am a reader, a lover of narrative; though primarily a bibliophile I love stories told in any medium. Last year I completed my honours year in Fine Arts with a project attempting to expand/describe the experience of reading a written (generally book shaped) text, personally to what success I’m not overly sure but the topic does continue to intrigue me. Narrative, no matter the form, has always been important to me; I was one of those children who could easily be persuaded into cleaning my room, practising the piano, scrubbing my teeth... etc with the threat of revoking my books or any TV privileges. One of my earliest memories, at about 2 years old, is of sitting in my eldest brother’s lap watching a simple ABC video/game on our old computer and enjoying it immensely. This same brother introduced me to simple DOS games as I grew older that I loved, mainly one that you had to hunt out particular words before being eaten by strange angry goo monsters (the title alludes me), as well as reader rabbit. Until writing this I hadn’t realised that all my early games were so heavily based in literacy, my love of reading and narrative seems to have started earlier that I thought and interestingly not solely through books as I expected; perhaps this in part can account for my openess toward non-typical narrative construction. Before this paper I hadn’t really considered narrative in terms of games which now seems ridiculous as there is so much relevant overlap with my honours project that would have aided me greatly when thinking about alternative narratives. One major point that I would like to discuss is that to me games are narrative no matter the level of agency (sorry narratologists) and that this level of agency and play lets the game player be the author, or co-author really, of the narrative/their experience with the text. This isn’t really a new theory,  in the text ‘The Death of the Author’ Roland Barthes strongly supports the reader as a creator of the text, he suggests that once the author finishes the text they are separated from it, while the multitude of readers allow every text to be eternally written here and now (145), a point which fits perfectly in terms of ergodic texts such as videogames. While he is speaking more of fixed texts such as books or films this concept of a continually evolving text, not in form but in interpretation, is very interesting one. The reading of any text is dependent on the context of the reader, whether they have agency within the text or not, as everyone has very different perceptions of things because of their cultural and social baggage (this is in part why game to movie, or vies-versa, adaptations struggle), so no matter how static the text it can be hard to compare experiences/readings/engagement. There almost seems to be a fear of the reader by static text authors, as readers have the ability to take their narratives down unexpected paths of growth when unguided. Game designers, from my limited experience through this course, are far more open to the contributions of the player which is very nice to see in my view as readers/gamers add a lot to a text. Perhaps mine and others increased recognition of the reader (no matter the medium being examined) has arisen from an increase in possible agency within texts (from technological advances essentially) blurring the line between author and reader, hopefully opening the perception of what is a narrative and how it can be constructed.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” Image, music, text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-8. Print.