Section I: At the Intersection of Games and E-Lit: Kathryn Manis in conversation with Nicholas Binford
N: I played the game back when it came out in 2013, I would have been 20 at the time, and it was just kind of a novelty. I saw it as a cool, sort of weird, walking simulator game that challenges your perceptions of games and its neat that it does that. And I didn’t really go further than that. This time around, I have worked in an office for 4 or 5 years, and I’ve developed a much more critical perspective on the games that I play. And I have to say that the game took on a whole new dimension for me. Particularly the office part – hearing him described as essentially a mind-controlled slave was a bit more poignant this time around. And they are very in your face about it, constantly reminding you that you are that slave as you play the game – the narrator tells you to push a button and you push a button. So, in that way, you get the feeling that you are “Stanley.”
And the main argument of that game is that you are not really making decisions, they dare you to try to make a decision, but always argue that you are only doing things that the creator wanted you to in the first place. So, it came across as a bit nihilistic or fatalistic and a little bit depressing.
K: Leading off of that, how was it different for you doing it as a group in this case? And especially since you were leading the traversal? Did that impact the experience at all? Did you observe people responding to it in any particular way? Or did that change the experience for you?
N: Yeah, a lot actually. Because The Stanley Parable has explicit decisions that you make, where the narrator prompts you to do something and you have a clear option of disobeying it. But there are lots of implicit decisions as well; decisions that aren’t obviously decisions. For example, there are a couple of endings of the game where you can throw Stanley off of a moving elevator so that he dies.
But the game and the narrator don’t dare you to do that; its not clear that that’s an option. So, when you are doing the group traversal, when its one person acting as a group and the group votes on what option to take or something like that, you can’t have a vote on an option that isn’t clear unless the player tells people that the option is there. And if the option is explained to you, it’s not experienced in the same way. Because the point of those options is to make you feel, even if for a brief moment, like you’ve defied the narrator – that you managed to actually break free from the rules of the game – only to discover that you didn’t. So, if that’s spelled out for you, that whole impact is gone. In think that you need to be the one in the driver’s seat actually controlling Stanley in the game in order to experience those options as intended.
But that definitely doesn’t mean it was a waste of time. It was still very interesting and a great introduction to what games can do for people who are less experienced with them. And everybody seemed to really enjoy it. It was kind of like a choose your own adventure game that we did as a group and that made for an interesting story. Everyone was pretty engaged and following along and listening and making an informed vote as to what we do next. So, overall, it was still a good experience. And I’m hoping to do something similar for my classes when I teach them.
K: Your DTC (Digital Technology and Culture) classes?
N: Yep. I’ll probably do a week on games and gaming with them.
K: I also thought it was interesting how different people were reacting to The Stanley Parable while we were doing that group traversal. I felt like the other experienced gamers in the room better anticipated what things were going to happen. Troy, for example, knew what was going to happen a lot of the time so he was kind of joking about it and it was a more lighthearted experience for him. Whereas it seemed like those of us who weren’t as into gaming were thinking about it as a narrative a little bit more, which is kind of a different experience for it. So it was more serious for some of us and then it was a sort of funny thing for some of the folks who were more game-experienced.
N: That’s a good point. I think its the case for a lot of people who play a lot of games, that they start to lose their impact because you’re fully aware of the fact that they are games. You’re more aware that you can turn it off at any point and there are no consequences to anything that you did in the game, to decisions you made or people you killed. You know, in a lot of games it’s all not-real and it feels very not-real. And some games today are trying to fix that. You have self-aware games like The Stanley Parable obviously, but then Undertale or Doki Doki Literature Club and several others are trying to make you believe that your actions do have consequences through various creative methods.
It was interesting too because I felt more invested in it during the group traversal because, while going meticulously through every ending for my own research, I was definitely feeling trapped; there really is no way out of this narrative that the creator has made, despite my best efforts.
K: That’s really interesting – so maybe the effect of the game works better the longer you spend with it?
N: Yeah, its interesting because I think when you haven’t played games – I used to say that I can’t talk to people about games if they play a little bit; you either have to play no games at all or you have to play a ton. Because those two groups have similar experiences for some reason, its like an arc. Whereas people who play just a little bit of games have that kind of laissez faire, “none of this is real, no big deal”, “we’re not taking this seriously” attitude, that I don’t share as someone who has been playing games for so long. But I do share it with people who have never played games because they haven’t started that arch where they – or maybe they haven’t descended out of caring about what’s going on yet. Like you said, you’re taking it seriously as a narrative. And that makes it more meaningful I think to you.
K: Absolutely. And that’s actually a great segue into my next question which is that, if I remember correctly, you are working with The Stanley Parable for your research project. Can you tell me a little bit about how that is developing or what exactly you’re dealing with in that paper?
N: I got really interested in The Stanley Parable’s claim that you do not make any choices when you play a game, especially a game like The Stanley Parable; that everything you do is basically pre-determined by the author; that you’re basically incapable of making choices or having thoughts that are outside of the context of what the author intended.
To backtrack a bit, there are theories that support this. Lev Manovich in his “Language of New Media” argues that we should not be calling what we call interactive media, interactive media. According to Manovich, all media is interactive. Whether you’re making interpretative moves as you view a piece of visual art or moving your body to look at sculpture, you know something that exists in 3D space, that’s a form of interaction. So, all art is interactive. And in calling something interactive media, it seems we’re only doing that when we’re doing something physically to it, like pushing a button. And that’s a problem because we forget that we interact with art in other ways.
And I’m kind of extrapolating this into the game world. In gaming we are constantly told by marketers or other players or by the developers that we are integrating ourselves with the media and that we are making ourselves part of the art, in a way, by making decisions and by performing actions that are ours and unique to us. That we are becoming co-authors of the game – that’s a really common thread in the scholarly criticism, that you become the co-author of the piece. And a game like The Stanley Parable really strongly rejects that idea. The Stanley Parable says you are absolutely not the co-author, you are not in control here, and they say this explicitly. Every ending of the game that deals with this issue explicitly denies your agency in the game. And it mocks you for ever thinking you had it.
K: Like through the narrator or in what happens? Or a little bit of both?
N: Both. But the narrator is pretty explicit in every ending. I think the clearest example is when in one of the endings he says, “you can never be anything but an observer in this world”. So, it’s pretty out there.
And there is only one ending that doesn’t say that. And it’s the ending which is called “The Freedom Ending”. But you get this ending by doing every single thing that the narrator says, all the way to the end. And at the end he tells you “you’re happy” “you’re free” and you actually lose control of your character and he just walks into the forest. To be happy and free, I guess.
K: We saw that one in our group traversal, I think.
N: Yeah, I think we did it as like our baseline. We were thinking, “okay, what happens if we do everything the narrator says?” here’s this ending. And then we can start branching out and disobeying the narrator, which is usually our first impulse when we play the game. But the irony of the freedom ending is pretty clear; that you only have freedom when you don’t try to exercise it; you only have autonomy when you don’t attempt to assert yourself in the game. But the second you try to be yourself in the game or to ignore the narrator, then the narrator turns on you and mocks you and becomes your enemy.
K: Okay, kind of a zooming out question here – this semester you’ve been taking the Videogame Narratives class as well as the Electronic Literature class. In your view, how do you see gaming and e-lit mixing, if at all? And what do you think the implications of separating them – or if you think we should combine them disciplinarily – what do you think the implications for that choice would be?
N: I feel that videogames are undeniably Electronic Literature. I’m biased, but when I heard the word, “electronic literature” I thought videogames. That is what many pieces of e-lit have evolved into; that’s what interactive fiction evolved into. It now exists in a genre of videogames that are often called walking simulators, where you don’t perform ludic actions or solve ludic puzzles or reach ludic objectives, you simply explore a 3D space to unearth a narrative, or something similar.
And the chronology or the genealogy of that seems very obvious to me, it would be strange to me to deny it. Videogames are almost indescribably significant to popular culture right now; they are one of the biggest industries on the planet. We ignore that at our peril, I guess, is what I’m saying.
To separate them, is to definitely reinforce a “high-art” “low-art” dichotomy and I don’t know that there is really any way around that. If you choose to separate them, to me, that’s effectively what you’re saying. I definitely understand the impulse to though. Taking critical stances on videogames is interesting but I have zero interest in doing that for Call of Duty or Football Manager – these games that are clearly mainstream, that are products designed to be consumed on a yearly basis by a casual audience. So, I definitely understand not wanting to look at that. But there’s so much more to the medium and to the industry than that now and we can’t ignore that.
K: I totally agree. And kind of along similar lines, how do you think, if at all, taking these different approaches to what – at least in our course content – often was overlapping material, did seeing those two different academic approaches to the same stuff, did that impact your view? What kind of experience did you have in taking the Games class and taking the E-Lit class and what is the conclusion for you after having done both?
N: I think the main difference was the era the criticism comes from. Most of the E-lit that we looked at comes from between the 1990’s and the early 2000’s, which is at this point a decade ago at the most recent. We looked mostly at the same 7 or 8 scholars – lots of Nick Montfort and lots of Katherine Hayles and Moulthrop etc. But they are doing very relevant and meaningful criticism, especially at the time when that technology was new or burgeoning and we were trying to figure out what we do with the art. And at the time, I’ll fully admit that videogames were very immature. They hadn’t developed to a point where they were taking on their medium as a self-reflexive commentary. So, I certainly would not blame any critic for looking at the E-Lit side of things because there is some interesting stuff going on there.
But now I think that videogames have matured – at least to a point that they are doing some interesting things on levels that E-Lit was not during that earlier period – because the technology has just continued to evolve. What technology has the potential to do is just greater than it used to be. So, it’s not a dig at E-Lit that videogames have taken over that spot, its just the inevitable trajectory of the technology.
And so, in Game Narratives we’re reading a lot more contemporary criticism and a lot more Philosophy as well. And they are asking some very interesting questions about what technology is doing to us as individuals or as a culture and what we should do with that information, which I think is very useful. So, it was often less about the pieces or the games themselves, and more about what they represented as a whole.
K: That makes me want to ask you a bit of an impromptu question, because I know we’ve talked about this a lot. But what you just said makes me think about the different ways that the disciplines deal with reception or with audience and what that means for how we’re supposed to study them. So, when we’re dealing with E-Lit we’re dealing with a very limited audience by virtue of its engagement with philosophical or sort of “high art” questions, as you described it. I’d be interested in hearing what you think about that – about the question of who’s looking at what and how we’re supposed to think about that as academics interested in both of these things?
N: E-Lit seems to be very prideful of their anti-popular stance. So, they’re not not-popular, they’re anti-popular; they’re actively avoiding – it seems to me – being mainstream or popular.
K: Sort of intentionally avant-garde?
N: Yeah, I’d say that they seem to be striving for that avant-garde status. I’m not an expert on that of course, but it seems like they attained it, at least for a while. We read in one of our essays that in an informal poll taken of 25 E-Lit scholars there, 22 had written a work of E-Lit and like 5 of them had read one. It’s definitely art that’s created for the artist more than for an audience and it’s not striving for commercial success.
Obviously, when you go to Game Narratives, that’s the pretty far extreme – video games are a capitalist, very powerful, very profitable industry. And money speaks. Right now, the state of the industry is that you have these titanic publishers, these multi-billion-dollar companies who basically cannibalize smaller studios that produce something good and then force them to produce a kind of soulless, crappy sequel. And then they shut the studio down. It’s actually very depressing.
K: Wow. That’s upsetting.
N: Yeah. Probably the most notable one is EA – Electronic Arts – they are notorious for this. There is actually a website that keeps track of all of the studios that they’ve murdered. Its very sad.
But we’re also more aware of this now. And this is another example of the industry maturing. So, for a while, between 2007 and 2014, there was this era of these titans preying on smaller companies before everyone became really aware of what was going on. And now people know; if you sell your studio to one of these companies, you’re not going to be around in 3 years. But that knowledge, that recognition of the predatory nature of the industry is helping to change it. And shape it in different ways. And you have things like the Indie explosion, where hundreds of thousands of independent developers are making games that are not always great, but at least they are produced by an individual and they are works of art with purpose and meaning and intent. And that’s more than can be said for other large games.
K: Great – thanks so much for your time, Nick.
N: No problem.