TEXTUAL GAMES, NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES AND GRAPHIC DESIGN

/ CAROLINE BRUN (website)
French

This research took place in 2015/2016 during my graphic design studies (DSAA – Diplôme Supérieur d'Arts Appliqués mention Design Graphique). Creative Commons CC BY.

Introduction

We live in a changing world – technical, technological and particularly computing evolutions have brought the society to a phase of reconstruction of its identity by questioning the place of work in our lives. Nowadays, people want to have a job which allows them to evolve or to nd alternatives to a bread and butter work.
Today, games are one of the major elements which o er people the possibility to brighten the disoriented world they live in. Playing is not marginal and childish anymore.

The intervention of computing sciences in the field of games began with the creation of interactive fictions, entire textual games inspired by “ gamebooks ”, which set up an interaction between players and machines through playful mechanics, while being technically easy to design and distribute.

For my research project, I decided to work on the theme of games, more precisely video games. However, it is such a vast field that I chose to work on the first games created on personal computers in the 1970s and the 1980s to study interactive fictions and “ gamebooks ”, which are the printed versions of interactive fictions. Adventure games tell textual stories and players use text commands to control the characters and influence the environment. In gamebooks, players read paragraphs, and at the end of each one, they choose between several paths which lead to different paragraphs.
I thought about the possible links between those archaic and marginal games, the way of reading and playing, and the work of designers which is to guide users.

According to Roger Caillois in Man, Play and Games, playing games is an experience, sometimes instrumented, which plunges us into a “ playful state ” which looks like no other, isolated from ordinary daily life.
It is a free, unproductive, fictitious activity which follows rules and falls into four possible categories – games which are based on competition (agôn), simulation (mimicry), fate (area), and finally those whose aim is to get an impression of dizziness (ilinx). Each game is ruled by at least one of these categories.

Textual games respect this theory – they are anchored in the notion of simulation thanks to the identification of the player with the character that he embodies during the adventure. The notion of fate is often present to counterbalance the confidence of the player with random data which in uflences directly his actions.

Interactive fictions

An interactive fiction is a textual game which allows a player to experience a fictional and interactive adventure. The player reads descriptions about rooms, objects, characters and he can react – he has to write text commands to interact. Players often need to draw some maps of the game while playing, to remember their way and all the traps, creatures and rooms they encounter.

The famous games of the 1980s were outdated at the end of the decade when computers evolved and could display images, then moving pictures and finally 3D with games like Doom. Since then, the creation of interactive fictions has been marginal. This is why I chose to work on these games – inter- active fictions are archaic games, some are the first experiences of video games. Today, the techniques used for game design are at a turning point and allow independent developers to experiment new ways, to explore new ideas – so, it is the right time to try to reinvest interactive fictions while adapting them to the current technical advance.

Identification

Roger Caillois, in his book Man, Play and Games (1961), defines simulation as the fact of becoming an imaginary character and behaving accordingly. It is about hiding the social character of the player behind a different role which frees him from the pressure of the conventions of one’s identity. We can also find this characteristic in literature, hence its essential place in textual games. This essential principle occurs in both games and literature, and has an essential place in textual games.

We can play a character because the text invites us to do so through grammatical and literary forms. The simplest example is the use of the first person narrative – games make us internalize completely unknown experiences and make us live them. The implication of the reader is intensified by the fact that the player acts by himself when he writes text commands.
Furthermore, reading and writing make the reader collect and synthesize information which is gradually given to him to create a narrative unity as complete as possible.

Choice

Choice is a central element in the playful typology of textual games – the interaction offered to the player is based on the possibility to make different decisions and to develop the story in various ways. In gamebooks, the reader has the choice to take various directions among several choices at the end of every paragraph; in interactive fictions, the player can chose different actions to reach different contents, some will make the story move forward whereas others will enrich the depth of the story. Players can use the text command “ examine ” to look at elements or rooms in the game – this information does not drive the story forward, but players learn more about the plot.

Can an adventure be irreversible? Graham A. Nelson published an essay entitled “ The Craft of Adventure ” taken from Designer’s Inform Manual, in which he explains that an author must not trap players for no reason and without notifying it. In other words, players must think and guess to get to the end of the story. However, if they cannot find clues, they can be confronted with events which that prevent them from carrying on – what are the solutions then? Compared to the possibilities of daily life, it is a kind of “ cheat ” – in interactive fictions, some designers give the opportunity to cancel some actions made by the players. Players can also return to “ checkpoints ” where they save their game. They can finally try the adventure from scratch and use their experience to move beyond the diffculties – the map drawn by the player is then helpful. In gamebooks, the possibilities are quite the same – players can return to the previous level, or start the adventure again.

Gamebooks and interactive fictions play on the notion of reversibility and the death of the charac-ter which is never for good. It would be interesting for designers to think about a different implementation of life expectancy in textual games – what would happen if the adventure stopped at the first failure of the player? Such an idea seems technically possible, for example by using some heat-sensitive paper which self-deletes while a player reads – thus making the player think actively not knowing what will happen next because it is impossible to start the game again. Furthermore, a community dimension could be added to reach the end of the adventure – a player could use the failures other players have gone through and avoid traps or dead-ends.

Graphic design

Interactive fictions and gamebooks raise questions about graphic design. Those games are only textual. The notions of text, digital interface, printed objects and reading practice are important topics in graphic design – designers, as mediators between the medium and its users, can then intervene in the specific field of games. They can analyse the medium and find concrete solutions regarding interface and design of contents.

Graphic designers think and work about the relationship between texts and images. Designing is not only creating pictures as designers cannot ignore the importance of text which is a universal language. They have to shape the textual material according to their graphic aims and create de facto a global entity of design.

The technical work of designers

Emmanuël Souchier, a teacher at Paris Sorbonne University who works on theories about texts on screens, explains the two major elements of textual entities – “ First Text ” and “ Second Text ”. “ First Text ” is the text in its narrative role. “ Second Text ” corresponds to its visual dimension, such as typography, shape or layout. “ Second Text ” enables us to read “ First Text ”. “ Second Text ” is the image of the text as it shows the relationships between images and text. “ First Text ” and “ Second Text ” are two different and complementary languages. Thus two texts evolve jointly – graphic designers have to work on both entities so that each one is as e cient as possible.

Designers work both on texts and pictures to create a visual poetry of texts. These texts are covered with a “ graphic layer ” which implies an additional reading – more than a simple illustration, designers are mediators of reading practices, like a heir of diorthôtès, the librarian-publishers in Alexandria, who were the first mediators between authors, texts and readers.

The work of “ First Text ” and “ Second Text ” can be seen through several literary experiments – Guillaume Apollinaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, or even Francesco Colonna in Le Songe de Poliphile.

The current issue in screen editions

The danger of mimesis from printed editions

There have been many ways to design texts and new habits about writing and reading, especially since the use of digital media.

As we can notice in the application IBooks available on IPads, some designers think reading on a screen has to keep the reading habits of a printed book – pagination, wooden bookcases, pages highlighted by projected shadows, ... We can notice that miming the archetypal aspect of printed books entails a backlash. Digital books are on a screen, we cannot really act the same way as with printed books because it is impossible to really turn the pages over or tear the paper, for example. Anthony Masure qualifies it as a “ fragmented [...] testimony ”, because it is an attempt to reproduce printed editions with technical limits.

Since 1960 we have discovered again a vertical or horizontal way to read with screens which existed in the rst form of hard copies with scrolling through a roll of papyrus or parchment. Hyperlinks compensate for the linearity of the rolled books – why should we model digital reading like a printed work, while the characteristics are obviously different?

To read on a screen is very different than reading a hard copy. Annick Lantenois, in her introduction from Lire à l’écran, says screen reading and the evolution of the conditions of decoding are determined by the device. If digital technologies create technologies of writing, they logically create technologies of reading – these conditions require what she calls “ understanding ” (“ savoir-comprendre ”) , which includes “ how-to-read ” (“ savoir-lire ”) and “ how- to-see ” (“ savoir-voir ”).

Yannick James completes the idea according to which the IT programming language is the key to understanding contents, but also involves the conditions of reading and writing.

What are the characteristics of screen reading ?

The Internet allows to reach simultaneously a reading space and a writing space, which can be modified at any time, for example blogs, or comments on web sites. We can be both readers and creators of contents like on Wikipedia.

We cannot leave aside essential characteristics of digital technology such as hypertext which allows to read differently. Indeed, the contextual aspect of reading is different with hypertexts. Hyperlinks make people jump from a text to another and give up any reference to the linearity of most printed books. We read hard copies from the beginning to the end, but with digital media we read from a text to another. Digital contents also make us create a progressive association of ideas, which Christian Vandendorpe explains as “ spreading ” rather than “ digging ” in a subject in Du papyrus à l’hypertexte – essai sur les mutations du texte et de la lecture.

The related fields of graphic design and computer engineering

The technical choices, according to Annick Lantenois, are too often left to engineers while these questions are central in graphic design. We nd only very few studies dedicated to the role of graphic design on these polymorphic and essential technologies, that Chrisitian Vandendorpe, a professor in Ottawa specialized in the theories of reading opposes to the “ prison of paper ”, that is to say printed books.

It is impossible to design without thinking about technical issues. Engineering skills are essential but nowadays designers can master technical aspects to solve problems, like web programming. Annick Lantenois explains the apprehension of graphic designers in the digital media “ for the benefit of graphic design focused on the craft production of books ”. Many designers want to avoid all the engineering questions and keep crafts’ traditions. These behaviours lead to mistakes about digital media, like copying the characteristics of printed editions for digital editions.

Project

I have created a game halfway between gamebooks and interactive fiction – I have kept distinctive elements of both types of games in a single project.
From gamebooks, I have kept the handling of the physical object and the ease to move forward in the story. From interactive fiction, I have kept the digital aspect by using interactive and digital media to enrich the story.

My project is a series of board games – each board game is based on an alternative story based on a major event in history which is a recurrent theme in gamebooks and interactive fictions.
The first prototype deals with Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, based on the book 11/22/63 written by Stephen King (and the TV series of the same name broadcast this year).

he game is a kind of card game which lets players create their own story. The players hold a deck of square cards whose reverse sides are numbered with both Roman number and a figure. They first put on the table card number I, 1 with the front side up – the players can read a small text. Next to this card, they put card number I, with figure 2, to continue the story, until they get a card with a choice to make. On the sides of those specific cards, the players can see some Roman numbers, and the text explains the different possible paths – they can choose how they continue the story with the corresponding number . If the roman number II is written at the top of the card, and number III is written on the right, the players can choose between directions II or III. If they choose number II, they look for the corresponding card in the deck (card II - 1) and put it next to the previous card. Then they continue the story like that to the end with different endings.

Almost all cards are only textual : only a few are illustrated. Integrated circuits are attached to these illustrated cards, which can be read on a RFID reader and they access to add-on contents and extra features to go deeper in the story. It can be music, sounds, video, pictures or motion videos related to the story – it is not essential to play the game, but it helps know more about the background of the story, like fashion or graphic design from a different time and place. It can also show documentary pictures, video or documents related to the event on which the game is based.

RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) uses electromagnetic fields to identify tags attached to objects – it is usually used for identification cards to unlock doors, for example. The integrated circuits sticked on card store electronical information (as a kind of barcode). The circuit needs to be next to the RFID reader to use information.

For my project I created a wood box to store my cards and dices, but also to store the RFID reader and the Arduino device. Indeed, the reader is connected to an Arduino card, which is connected to a computer, to work with the game. I programmed my Arduino device to be able to recognize each card and to set them appart from others. Arduino then sends information of identification to Processing, another software which is able to use the data to display the visual content : this last code collects the identification number from the card put on the reader, and displays on the screen the picture, video or sound attached to the illustration.

I created the prototype of this game to rehabilitate the practice of gamebooks in a more playful way. People who do not know about gamebooks can discover non-linear stories and might want to play gamebooks later on.
The link between the project and my research subject is based on the construction of non-linear reading. Putting each card on the table according to a specific pattern lets players be aware of the way they read and choose. The game is like a map of the story whose different choices are materialised by a changing direction on the table. Adding additional content is a good way to enhance the contextual aspect of digital media and the fact of reading gradually to make associations of ideas and get information on a subject (as explained by Christian Vandendorpe talking about “ spreading ” instead of “ digging ”).