Timbo
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 Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 2:08 pm Post subject: Point of View in Video games |
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I have been spedning the past couple of weeks or so working on a paper about the literary point of view in video games and the uniqueness of it. I finished it today and I would like to get seom feedback from gamers on thr cohesiveness of my argument and on conclusion it makes and the impiclations of it. It hasn't been edited yet and I want to add more, so this is mostly a rough draft. Please be as blunt and honest as possible in your critique. Here's the paper:
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The point of view is a an essential part of any story. It establishes how a reader or viewer sees the main characters and it tells who's telling the story, giving the ability to identify any biases. It is impossible to have a story with out a point of view for the story. Video games definitely tell stories, so the next logical question is : what is the point of view in a videogame?
Before getting into that, I wish to lay out the three dominant points of view that are used in literary works. There is first person, where the story is told through the eyes of the narrator using ‘I‘, such as "I went to the store,. I saw Sally and heard here say ‘hello'. I felt like crying.". Third person is a another commonly seen point of view and relies primarily on using ‘he‘, ‘she', ‘it' or direct names, such as "He went to the store. Sally was there and she said ‘hello' and he felt like crying." Third person can be further divided up into a three sections: limited, omniscient and objective. Limited will focus on one main character thoughts and action, but not portray the character as the narrator, omniscient will have access to everything, switching between the thoughts of characters and objective has a ‘fly on the wall' fell, making it so the narrator appears to be a passive observer, not having access to any character's thoughts. The final and least commonly used point of view in literature is that of the second point view, where the narrator is another character in the story telling it to an audience that may or may not be another character, an example would be "You went to the store. You saw Sally there and heard her say ‘hello'. You felt like crying." Another example that may be more commonly known is the ‘choose your own adventure' series of books from the late 70s to the late 90s or a self help book that talks directly to the reader.
A problem with using these traditional labels of point of view happens when talking about movies. Traditional first person point of view has us reading the main character's thoughts and seeing what they see. But, consider the movie American Beauty. The movie is presented as Lester telling us his story directly, which would be a first person point of view. But, we don't view the world through his eyes, we see if from a camera angle behind him the majority of the time, making it a third person visual perspective. Can this be said to be first person or third person? The traditional definitions break down and we can only describe movies two different types of point of view, visual and narrative. The narrative point of view is the point of view that the story is presented in and the visual point of view is the point of view that appears on the screen. So, to use the same example of American Beauty, we have a narrative first person point of view and a visual third person point of view. What is interesting in film, is that these points of view can change frequently and not leave the viewer feeling awkward. Apocalypse Now will switch between first person and third person narratives frequently when going from Willard's thoughts to conversations amongst the soldiers and the visual point of view will switch between Willard reading a document to the soldiers piloting a boat. These go seamlessly from one another to the viewer.
Now, if we are using these definitions for point of view, what point of view does a video game possess? Judging from a literature standpoint, video games have the same problems as movie have. The graphical presentation mixes up what we see and how we see it. Consider FFX, it starts out with us viewing the world through Tidus's eyes and hearing his thoughts, then switches to us viewing him playing Blitzball and hearing the crowd yelling in a cutscene. Using the literature definitions is very unhelpful. Using the film definitions is more useful, as we can talk about how we hear Tidus' thoughts but are watching him run around. Video games also have the same seamless shifts of point of view that movies have. But, it is interesting that in video games the dominant narrative point of view is second person, while movies seldom use it.
Second person narratives are unique from other points of view in their ability to immerse the reader, or player. The ‘you' in second person is used in two ways, both that immerse the reader into the narrative on a greater level than other points of view. The first use of ‘you' (and the more commonly used way) uses ‘you' to directly speak to the audience. Choose Your Own Adventure books speak directly to the reader to progress the storyline and the decision of the reader affects the story. If it obvious that this type of story relied heavily on the reader. The second use of ‘you' in second person narratives, has two characters talking to one another, with a secondary character describing the actions to the main protagonist. The ‘you' in these stories is a non-reader character in the story, but the reader is often ‘tricked' into thinking the story is directly speaking to them, by use of the language and subject matter. Although it is not always the case, when the reader is ‘tricked' they are more affected by the language of the narrative, as the reader feels that they are being directly spoken to as opposed to being an observer. Second person narratives, in either usage, have more direct interaction with the reader.
Direct interaction is important when it comes to emotional responses. First person and third narrative keep the reader separate from the story, and any emotional response will arise from feelings of empathy, the ability to feel for another. Second person narratives differ in the emotional interaction, as they deal with more direct emotional responses of the readers. Consider the emotion of love. A reader can observe the love of Romeo and Juliet and feel moved, but this is a different experience than a person experiencing love. Although second person narratives cannot create direct experiences of love, the experience of having the reader be a character creates an experience closer to the real thing.. To put it simply, people will always have a greater understanding and a greater feeling of emotion when it is their own experience, not one observed of another.
So what does this all have to do with video games? Video games, with their dominant second person narrative style, have a greater capacity to invoke direct emotion in those who interact with the medium. Literature and movies can show the affects of a tragedy, but video games will cause you to experience the tragedy itself. The possibilities of this are vast. Consider how historically movies and books have been able to affectively influence society by expressing new ideas or showing images of horrors and joys that one would normally not be able to see. Now consider how much larger this impact would be if people would experience these horrors and joys. Consider how much scarier it is playing Resident Evil 4 and having a few men with axes and a man with a chainsaw coming after you to the horror invoked by horror movies.
One can point out the obvious, that video games historically haven't created the same emotional affects that movies or literature have created in almost all emotions. The reason for this apparent paradox, is in the settings and genres that video games have been placed in. Video game storylines have historically been of the action adventure genre, set in war, science fiction or fantasy settings. An action adventure story's main focus is to get the audience‘s adrenaline pumping, and other aspects are a side note to the main purpose. The emotional effect of video games has been similar to this in most cases, as you have the adrenaline pumping when you fight a boss or run from a boulder. There's never been a video game that has focused on making you live the part of a love story or a tragedy. Video games can create these games, but they would most likely be unprofitable, explaining why we don't see them.
The point remains that video games are the only medium right now to be able to invoke direct emotional responses from its participants, as opposed to empathy, resulting from the dominant point of view. Whether or not this will be used in the future is uncertain, but it is something to consider for game developers, literary critics and those who wish to express video games as an art form. |
Please help me get this to be more scholarly.
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Flare
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| Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 1:18 am Post subject: |
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I think that you make good points and everything. I just have a few grammatical type suggestions. First, you should get rid of all and any contractions. This will not only make your paper longer if you have a length requirement, but it also makes it more formal. Second, you should write out Final Fantasy X, instead of just simply putting FFX, basically for the same reasons as the contractions. Oh, and you should probably capitalize 'Choose Your Own Adventure' and when Sally says, "Hello". Put your examples of the people talking (like Sally) in quotation marks in stead of the apostraphe thing. Usually the apostraphe is used when a person talking is quoting another person talking. Other than that, I think it's good.
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Starslasher
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| Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 1:30 am Post subject: |
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It seems that you really, really thought this out well. I really just have one comment to make:
- I felt that the paragraph using the movies is irrelevant. It does not deal with point of views in video games, so i feel that it should be omitted. It looks like having two introductory paragraphs, so either put the main content of the third paragraph into either the second (explaining about the variations of the POVs), or into the other paragraph, in my opinion.
- This isn't that important, but i felt that Suikoden III should have some mention in it, since it is truly unique for the Trinity system. It allows you to play through the eyes of 3 (6) characters, viewsthe storyline from different angles, and fills in gaps that weren't explained within one of the POVs. But it's just an advice, you don't have to put it in.
Otherwise, it was done quite well, Timbo.
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Tony Stark
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| Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 2:51 am Post subject: |
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I disagree with both of Starslasher's criticisms, respectfully of course. I think that the movie idea does a great job of providing application of Points of View to anything but literature. It is a key idea in logical thought progression as it furthers the need to investigate the question, and follows a logical progression of technological movement, as well as regular human thought. He was right though that it seemed like it should be a logical part of your thesis. Which would make it more scholarly, but I personally like it the way it is. But, I'm a fan of irregular methods, so I'm probably not the best person to listen to.
While I generally think there needs to be more detail here, and examples of video games and such (and perhaps even more movies (though I am thrilled you picked my favorite movie for discussion)), I think that you did well sticking to popular games, as you can assume your audience is educated to a point, but since Suikoden III did not see very well (and since I do not think the game is innovative enough to really not specifically), it is not a very good example. It also follows the same rule of FFX and only gives you very limited freedom. You could site Game of the Year winners Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or several other games.
Since interaction is so key to gaming this is an interesting thing to consider. A style thing is that when introducing an idea, you use rather short sentances. In order to bring love to the forefront of someone's mind, you say "Consider the emotion of love." Instead, you could try paragraph seperations, and combining this sentance and the following sentance. You could also try shorter paragraphs, but that's not very scholarly, I suppose.
I liked your essay very much, and think it stands very well on its own, but more detail and clairty is what I would suggest if you want to make this more scholarly.
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