So on Monday, I gave a short 5 minute sprint talk at the Digital Humanities conference held by AUB. It was an amazing experience, with Ray Siemens and Lynn Siemens (Victoria), Sebastian Gunther (Goettingen), Caren Kaplan (UC Davis), the Provost Ahmad Dallal, President Peter Dorman of AUB, Chairman David Wrisley of the English Department, as well as many other AUB teachers, staff and students present. I began the talk with a “Hi! My name is Sagger Khraishi, and I am a game designer.” As I looked at the people present, I smiled and then said, “Well, when I tell people that, the usual reply is, ‘Cool! So are you a computer science major? CMPS?’ ” and then I would reply back with, “No, I am an English Major.”
With some laughs happening there, really did ease the tension, I brought up the context of my discussion, talking about how with the expansion of video games in the setting of the mobile game environment, the interactive narrative presents itself as a new form of literature to a larger audience. From things between the lore, scripts, background, and over arching story – the small stories presented have moved back to the dime-back selection of novels.
Opening up a large image of Space Invaders, 1977, I talked about how that was the first narrative. You were given the mission, and put through with limited text to complete wave after wave of never ending monsters. Narratives have evolved though, over time to a larger audience. I quoted some stats from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA)’s 2012’s Essential facts about the computer and videogame industry. The average gamer is 30 years old, with 12 years of experience. 47% of the gamers are females, middle age women group being 68% larger than the 18 to 20 year old male group. 33% of players play with smart phones, 25% hand held devices. And that half a billion play world wide at least an hour a day (Taken from “Reality is Broken” by Jane McGonigal).
So I came back to the explanation of the narrative with Space Wars, despite it being deviant, and mentioned about the different places you would find text, such as Skyrim’s 820 in game books to help support the lore. Of how World Of Warcraft, has the lore and as the player, the avatar places themselves within the lore and creates a new journey through the interactive narrative. I stressed on how many games, except for the rare ones that achieve the never-ending story, use the narrative to give completion. The completion is found using audio, visual, or textual cues.
There, I mentioned about Angry Birds reaching 1.7 billion downloads so far. This was tied in to the technology. The technology allows us to interface with a larger audience as people shift from board games to virtual ones. This leads to a greater interactivity with the player creating the avatar to interact with the story and to expand. I gave the focus of role-playing games as an example, tying back to World of Warcraft and Skyrim.
With the avatar creating a personalized story within the story, this may seem as a smaller scale to the imagination present when reading actual texts. But the difference is that these games give an alternate form of interactivity, with such things as the use of network cafes to personal computers.
With this, I moved to the Content & Form, Theory & Practice. I spoke about how with games, we need to step away from the view that we are the narratologist, as literary theory is more than just narratology with games. I mentioned about the never ending story there, and talked again about the dime-back pharmacy novels and how we should use these games as an alternate form of story telling. I told the audience to imagine telling a story to 1.7 billion people, which would be affected to some extent. And I asked, as a writer, wouldn’t that be an amazing thing to achieve? The topic then moved on with another example of Bioshock Infinte, having 20k more words than the average novel (source: Irrational Games).
As to why the university should focus on this, more and more companies have been hiring writers over the years, as games shifted (at least what I believe) from who looks pretty to a stronger base of content. Given the audience, as seen with Angry Birds for a buck ninety-nine, this should not be ignored. From here, the conversation split into two points. One is about a certain Avant-garde fallacy that is drawn out from this. Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou is a movie where it is hard to make a coherent story due to the temporal skips. With this, as a reply to that, it is important to remember that text becomes discourse as an alternate form. This ties back to the audio cues and visual cues to present the story without the story itself disappearing.
The second point came after the talk in the discussion. I mentioned about how this still requires interdisciplinary cooperation to create the games, even for things such as text based games. This is why it would be important for AUB to create a game design major, which would be one of the first in the Middle East, especially at a respected university. The second point was that the courses are already available. What is important though, is to change the perspectives on the courses and group them up to be placed under the major. For game writings for instance, the creative writing as well as play writing courses to learn how to write in scripts is important. Use of excel, at least a basic understanding of coding is important. The courses are there. The third point was about how Western games are already to an extent racist. You have games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counterstrike, which portray Arabs as terrorists.
By giving the Middle East the tools to counter the anti-arab orient, it will gain better support from the country, as well as politically in Lebanon. (There was silence at this point, which felt pretty good as the words sunk in).
And with that, I closed the talk and sat down with the applause. Damn that felt good.
Daydreams that build Worlds 