In an effort to take one more last ditch effort to find material for your essays, go ahead and post any and all quotations from Burden and Gouglas and Jenkins that you either are using in your essays or are thinking of using… you can also feel free to post interesting/unclear quotes as well, just for the sake of discussion…
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“The central narrative is the main character’s search for answers and escape while serving as the experimental subject of an algorithmic machine focused on testing purely for testing’s sake. The game’s chief conceit rests on the computer gone awry, presaging the algorithmic control and growing dominance of metrics, analytics and surveillance in modern society.”
“However, the procedural nature of games provides a unique opportunity to explore the increasingly procedural nature of such increasingly prevalent technology. Interaction is essential to this exploration. Trapped within the Aperture Science facility, subjected to algorithmic constraints that frame all knowledge production as process, Portal artfully explores issues well beyond the confines of its test chambers.”
“Harmony between the game mechanic and the story ensures emotional resonance between Chell’s suffocation in the workings of the system and the player’s own frustration in moving through the game. Unlike other artworks, Portal not only communicates emotion but also allows for play to achieve it.”
“The game world is an algorithmic simulation of physical existence…As such, video games provide a fruitful medium for the exploration of what it means to be a human in a world increasingly dominated by algorithms.”
“The core challenge in defining art-worthiness, identified by Weitz (1956), is that any definition presupposes a limit on what new art can entail, which will inevitably be challenged because that is a function of art itself.”
“Game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces.” (Burden and Gouglas 121)
“We might describe musicals, action films, or slapstick comedies as having accordion like structures. Certain plot points are fixed, whereas other moments can be expanded and contracted in response to audience feedback without serious complications to the overall plot.” (Burden and Gouglas 125)
GLaDOS, an artificial intelligence that serves as the antagonist in Portal (Valve, 2007), is a collection of complex algorithms unified in single purpose to test for testing’s sake – and the algorithms have gone mad. Chell, the test-subject protagonist, is nothing more than a necessary algorithmic input. The experiments within the Aperture Science test facility act like algorithms, taking their input and producing output: pass or fail. Death for Chell is just a failed test – a mark recorded amongst the other data for later statistical analysis in the search for Taylorist efficiency. As GLaDOS has lost all external context beyond her own functioning, Chell’s escape from the algorithm is necessary for survival.
Burden and Gouglas:
“Portal does gain its art-worthiness in a matter like films: a specific objection might be that it has a linear plot.”
“Videogames uniquely combine the qualities of game play, world simulation and narrative (Lindley, 2003).”
“It is clear that games can signify in ways that other narrative forms have already established: through sound and image, material and text, representations of movement and space. . . . ”
“. . . But perhaps there are ways that only games can signify, drawing on their unique status as explicitly interactive narrative systems of formal play (Zimmerman, 2004, p. 162).”
Jenkins:
“There is a tremendous amount that game designers and critics could learn through making meaningful comparisons with other storytelling media. One gets rid of narrative as a framework for thinking about games only at one’s own risk.”
“Many games do have narrative aspirations. Minimally, they want to tap the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences.”
“If game designers are going to tell stories, they should tell them well. In order to do that, game designers, who are most often schooled in computer science or graphic design, need to be retooled in the basic vocabulary of narrative theory.”
“Much of the writing in the ludologist tradition is unduly polemical: they are so busy trying to pull game designers out of their “cinema envy” or define a field where no hypertext theorist dares to venture that they are prematurely dismissing the use value of narrative for understanding their desired object of study.”
“Performance theorists have described role-playing games (RPG’s) as a mode of collaborative storytelling. ”
“The story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell.”
“In each of these cases, choices about the design and organization of game spaces have narratological consequences. ”
“In each case it makes sense to think of games designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects.”
“Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power. (Adams 1999)”
“There is a direct, immediate conflict between the demands of a story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story’s path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player’s freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game. (Costikyan 2000, 44-53)”
“Computer games are not narratives… rather the narrative tends to be isolated from or even work against the computer-game-ness of the game. (Juul 1998)”
“The experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story.”
“Game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than on plotting or character motivation.”
“Game critics often note that the player’s participation poses a potential threat to the narrative construction, whereas the hard rails of the plotting can overly constrain the “freedom, power, and self-expression” associated with interactivity (Adams 1999).”
“The central narrative is the main character’s search for answers and escape while serving as the experimental subject of an algorithmic machine focused on testing purely for testing’s sake. The game’s chief conceit rests on the computer gone awry, presaging the algorithmic control and growing dominance of metrics, analytics and surveillance in modern society.”
“Performance theorists have described role-playing games (RPG’s) as a mode of collaborative storytelling. “
“If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories.” -Jenkins
“We must, therefore, be attentive to the particularity of games as a medium, specifically what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions.” -Jenkins
Michael Burden, Sean Gouglas
“And finally, we examine the tension between the confines of a game (its rules, controls, levels) and the expressive freedom of art to challenge rules.”
“The central narrative is the main character’s search for answers and escape while serving as the experimental subject of an algorithmic machine focused on testing purely for testing’s sake.”
Jenkins
“When game designers draw story elements from existing film or literary genres, they are most apt to tap those genres — fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war — which are most invested in world-making and spatial storytelling.”
“Narrative enters such games on two levels — in terms of broadly defined goals or conflicts and on the level of localized incidents.”
Burden and Gouglas: “Videogames uniquely combine the qualities of game play, world simulation and narrative (Lindley, 2003). As such, videogames provide a fruitful medium for the exploration of what it means to be a human in a world increasingly dominated by algorithms.”
“All videogames are algorithms, and therefore, Portal is an algorithmic exploration of human struggle against algorithmic processes. The game’s very nature is an adherence to rules. Art’s very nature is to challenge rules, to the point of defying definition.”
Jenkins: “What games do best will almost certainly center around their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with.”
“Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories that respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character’s movement across the map.”
“In Braid, the game mechanic allows the flow of time to disengage from the physical and draw closer to the psychological experience of time; another medium might represent time like clocks melting in the sun.”
“The videogame Portal is an algorithmic exploration of human struggle against algorithmic processes that have superseded their original intended purpose. The game explores the search for freedom from such computational processes.” -Burden and Gouglas
“Videogames uniquely combine the qualities of game play, world simulation and narrative (Lindley, 2003). As such, videogames provide a fruitful medium for the exploration of what it means to be a human in a world increasingly dominated by algorithms”
“Many games do have narrative aspirations . Minimally, they want to tap the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences”
“Another response is that acceptance of art is often institutional, where art is art “in light of things already adjudged as art” (Carroll, 1998, p. 7). This acceptance of art into the art world as a key factor in determining art appears in other critical works. Eaton (1983) suggests that communities decide art, while Bailey notes the need for some community to consent to an object’s status as art (Bailey 2000). “
Video games have “the need for engagement with the medium, including exhibition, award and critical analysis. The quality and thematic complexity of some modern videogames invites such critical discourse: Braid explores issues of time and regret in a love affair; Flow explores consumption, evolution and death; The Marriage explores the fragility of relationships over time when balanced with the personal needs of the partners; Limbo explores our deepest psychological fears of death and longing; Ico juxtaposes the playful adventures of a young boy against a young woman’s keen awareness of their real danger.”