Narrative Structure in Trans-Reality Role-Playing Games: Integrating Story Construction from Live Action, Table Top and Computer-Based Role-Playing Games

Thematic Areas: Under Development, Theoretical Perspectives, History and Typology of Games, Design and Game Architectures, Game Aesthetics and Storytelling 1000 Word Abstract: Trans-reality games are games combining virtual gaming with game experiences staged and played in physical environments. Mobile, ubiquitous and pervasive gaming technologies provide a facilitating infrastructure for trans-reality games. The technical infrastructure must integrate physical game elements with virtual game elements, ideally allowing game play and components to move as "seamlessly" as possible through these spaces as parts of a single coherent game world. This means the preservation of the sense of identity of game objects through their manifestation in different physical and virtual realities, the propagation of the significance of game actions and events through these realities, and game mechanics that weave those events into a coherent game concept. The development of design principles and methodologies for trans-reality games requires a model of the relationships between the functional roles of players and technologies, how these vary with different game staging and scenarios, and how these variations can be integrated within games that involve different modes of physical, virtual and mixed reality game play. In the case of trans-reality role-playing games (TRRPGs) these questions extend to issues of characterization and story construction. The concept of a TRRPG extends and evolves existing role-playing game (RPG) forms including table-top (TTRPG), live-action (LARP), computer-based, and especially massively multiplayer on-line (MMORPG), RPGs. A game system consisting of core rules and basic models for such things as characters and objects, their features and capabilities, combat, economics and trading, can often be used across all of these different contexts. However, despite this trans-mediality of the game system, the experience of characterization and narrative depth among different RPG forms is fundamentally different, largely due to radically different modes of story construction among the different forms. Previous work has analysed the relationships between simulation, game play and narrativity in computer games (see Aarseth, 1997, Frasca, 2001, and Lindley, 2003). These distinctions can be generalized into a model of the structure of all RPG forms, including table-top and live-action RPGs. The simulation level generalizes to a simulation/realization level providing a world within which game and story experiences take place. The game world may be realized with a literal representation (the game space stands for itself), synthetic or fictional representation (the world is realized symbolically), or some hybrid of literal and synthetic elements. The simulation level also includes foundations for realizing a range of possible literal or symbolic actions. This is the lowest level of temporal design in a ludic system upon which is superimposed a game level that includes rules specifying actions constituting valid game moves together with objectives for players to achieve by the performance of game moves. The time structure of each move requires a higher level of design than the simulation/realization level. However, the potential for players to choose moves results in a very loosely predefined time structure above the level of moves within the design of a game. Above the level of game moves, narrative is perceived when an experience in time has an overall shape conforming to a specific narrative pattern, such as the three-act restorative structure. This is the highest level of predefined time structure. In general a narrative is a representation of events. In computer games this often has the form of a filmic story told by cut scenes and framing the play experience (performance of moves) at a high level. Structural theories of textual and verbal narrative posit a generative substrate (a cultural space of possible stories) underlying the diegesis or specific objects and events of a particular narrative. The diegesis and its events constitute a story. The selection and presentation of elements of the story, with expressive variations of emphasis, constitute a plot. The plot is expressed in an act of telling, ie. a particular narrative. The available text is the narrative, while the other layers of meaning are inferred from the text and its relationship with other texts. Considering narrative construction and encoding within RPGs reveals very different relationships to this model. A TTRPG may be based upon published game worlds, scenarios and systems including elements of classic textual narrative. This provides the foundation for a game master and group of players to improvise a new (primarily verbal) narrative through the unfolding play sessions of a TTRPG campaign. Improvisation involves assembling sequences of fictive blocks, basic fragments or units of fictional/narrative significance that may be strung together to form a higher level narrative (Mackay, 2001). The fictive blocks include moves and text provided by the game system together with those drawn from the players’ imaginations and experiences. A computer-based MMORPG, however, provides players with a finite and fixed set of possible moves, together with the media foundation for realising moves as audiovisual and simulation events. Hence the MMORPG player generally chooses from predefined fictive blocks, supplemented by textual interaction with other players via chat facilities. This is a severely constrained improvisational freedom compared with the other RPG forms; the computer RPG removes much of the space for individual interpretation and imaginative elaboration by providing very explicit visualisations together with very limited options for improvisation. Collaborative story formation in LARPs is different again. While a TTRPG collaboratively produces a collective text upon which individual acts of imagination build, a LARP consists of a kind of performative multitext; there is no central social representation (or narrative), and there is a different story for each player, none occupying a privileged position as keeper of a primary story. The LARP setting may vary in its diegetic freedom between that of a MMORPG and that of a TTRPG, depending upon the literalness of representation of its setting, costumes, props and performances. LARP performances have the full advantage of all avenues of direct, face-to-face human communication, leading to the possibility of the highest levels of immersive and emotional experience. A trans-reality RPG (TRRPG) must integrate the different narrative modalities of RPG forms into a coherent overall system. This requires a careful mapping of player roles and technical mechanisms onto narrative functions in ways that preserve or enhance the strengths of the different play modalities involved, and ideally feed the results of play from their strong modalities into the other modes to enrich the overall TRRPG experience. REFERENCES Aarseth E. J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, The Johns Hoplins University Press, 1997. Frasca G. Videogames of the Oppressed – Videogames as a Means for Critical Thinking and Debate, Masters Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2001. Lindley C. A. 2003 "Game Taxonomies: A High Level Framework for Game Analysis and Design", Gamasutra feature article, 3 October 2003, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20031003/lindley_01.shtml. Mackay D. 2001 The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.