Email: narratology comment

Hi Malstrom!

I think you were wrong in the “Narratologists Grasping at Straws” post.
That guy clearly used his own definition of the word “narratology”, and you have little right to condemn him while you constantly write articles and posts with obscure terms like “Sony Saturn”, “Birdmen”, “mythos”, your own definition of “core”, “hardcore”, and “casual”, etc. All of these could be, and are, constantly misunderstood when grabbed out of context.

When you say “narratologist”, you mean games with lots of written or spoken story.

When he said “narratology”, he meant something like: “the stuff that the game communicates at me”

You asked: “This desperate outreach to make Wii Sports Resort into a narratology game raises questions. Why try to turn it into a narratology game? What is the point?”

-Well, he didn’t try anything like that. The whole point of the article was, that Wii Sports Resort is NOT a traditional narratologist game by your definition.

But it has lots of, as he said: “gameplay narratology”, something that, I think you would call “mythos”.

The whole article was a big praising of the game. A true narratologist, buy your definition, would hate WSR. This guy LOVES the game because it is not a traditional narratologist game, the two of you just happened to make up a different terminology.

You forget that in that blog post that I linked to a very popular narratologist article where the narratologist defines narratology. The opposite of narratology is ludology. The problem with Wii Sports Resort becoming a narratology game (based on the notion that the gameplay is derived from the setting that is WuHu Island) is that it presents no ludology counter-example. If WSR is a narratology game, then almost every game suddenly become ‘narratology games’.

Words mean things.

As for Mythos, it is a real word that comes to us from Aristotle. The phenomenon of which I label Mythos may be incorrect and different from Aristotle’s definition. But there is no other similiarity to it in the English language (which is rare). The label of “Mythos” is good to communicate to the reader because the word has the same gravity as ‘mythology’ yet it is not mythology. ‘Mythos’ should be percieved, due its label, as something very old, a little mysterious, similiar to ‘mythology’.

Mythos is my answer as to why games, or type of games, can sell forever. There is obviously something inside that game that is giving its ‘timeless’ quality. It isn’t in the graphics, gameplay, or even music.

Alice in Wonderland is timeless. Since Super Mario Brothers was heavily influenced by Alice in Wonderland, whether knowlingly or unknowingly, Super Mario Brothers becomes timeless. Super Mario Brothers will actually lead people to Alice and Wonderland.

Or let us take Hamlet. Why is that one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays? Why does it have such power to move? Well, you can point to older plays and ‘sources’ and ‘history’ of Denmark, you can point to political climate or Shakespeare’s personality eccentricities, but none of this really gets to the heart of the matter. It describes the soil, the sunlight, the rain water, but we never get to the seed.

There is a very ancient ‘tale’ that has bobbed up to the surface every thousand or two thousand years. It is the story of the Change of Eras (often marking when a new constellation became the focus marking a new era). It is the story of a young man, who is the new Era, who kills his scheming uncle, the Old Era who marries the queen and mother of the young prince. This story keeps reappearing, in different forms, but doesn’t take the form of a story but more as a type of… revered ‘wisdom’ kept close to the elders. An artifact from that source surfaces in the line of “Time is out of joint and cursed spite/ that I was ever born to set it right.” This line makes no sense in the play, but when you see that it makes sense when you look at the old line of these revered ‘wisdoms’ that stretch back thousands and thousands of years about the breaking of the Old Era and the creation of the New Era. It is a clue, I believe, in why something like Hamlet has such power.

My hypothesis is that gaming is not a new medium but a very ancient one, or has roots in some ancient medium. Back then, it was wrapped around mathematics and, largely, music. If you’ve noticed, pretty much all gameplay is a form of mathematics. The emotion that gaming creates is really a type of ‘hypnosis’ in a sense of how it affects the brain which is where music becomes so important. Have you noticed how many games can be successful being even just about music? After all, Plato did ban music from his Republic for a reason.

But these thoughts are very unrefined and will take more serious thought to clarify and shape them. When you hear people complain about the ‘lack of characters’ and ‘lack of sophisticated plot’ in some very ancient tales, such as Beowulf (Beowulf would be very recent of such oral transmissions), they fit the shape and scope of most video games exactly.

When wondering where did all these oral transmissions, which were very important to the very ancient societies, go, I realized they haven’t been picked up by modern books, movies, or television. Yet, they seem present everywhere in gaming. I think it is a topic worth exploring.

Plato was the last guy who could speak that ancient mythos language. Aristotle noted and admired all those oral transmissions and their mathematical precision, and he lamented their loss. It makes me wonder if there is a Human need and desire for those ancient transmissions and that is the true reason why classic video games became so revered and why gaming is so passionately discussed today.