Torben Grodal, "Stories For Eye, Ear and Muscles: Video Games, Media, and Embodied Experience"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Video games are simulations of the "basic modes of real life experience"
- Grodal claims that cognitive psychology is better equipped than semiotics for understanding games
- Stories as "body-brain-internal" processes that need to be compatible with that platform
- Stories are innate, not (just) socially constructed, and they structure non-mediated lived experience as well as mediated/fictional events
- Story does not equal fiction, necessarily
- Higher vs lower-order goals (survival vs wealth)
- Story as flow, emotional-relational reaction patterns, not "logic"
- Continuous interaction between perceptions, emotions, cognitions and actions
- Different forms activate different parts of this flow
- Consciousness is storylike, non-verbal
- Games simulate our first-person "story" experience (ie: consciousness), "full experiential flow"
- Visual-motor links (hand-eye coordination?)
- Verbal storytelling (or written language) is one media-specific form of story experience, and so language-based approaches cannot account for other forms, such as games
- Semiotic meaning is rooted in concrete perception/motor patterns
- Stories pre-date language
- Games rely on non-verbal skills
- Story/narrative are not the only way we experience the world (and games can activate other experiential modes, presumably)
- "Canonical story," linear progression (gels with our mental machinery)
- Third-person is an expansion of first-person (extrapolate from our own experiences)
- Stories as "retelling" vs taking place in an unfolding present
- "Games often focus on the 'how' of a story." (Like film noir and mystery novels, which are also often compared to games?)
- Problem with conflating story experience with verbal (re)telling (which is a story medium)
- "Story simulation"
- Interactivity relates to motor skills
- Video games are closest to our basic embodied story-experience
- Player needs skills to navigate/advance the story
- Games require more detailed cognitive maps and motor skills (a mental map of Liberty City, or the ability to aim an in-game weapon)
- Play, rather than games, is innate in human beings (games are a form of play and can be a form of story)
- Play is only play without real-life intentions/risks (so gambling, physical combat sports do not qualify? This seems problematic.)
- Play(fulness) as a feature of all/many fictions
- Repetition (reversibility) of games, exploration of patterns and rules
- Genre as a "game" of sorts (perhaps a nomic game, in which the rules are not fixed)
- "Fictions are about the concerns of anthropomorphic beings."
- "System-based" vs "manifestation-based" experiences
- Stories and games are overlapping categories
- Interactivity means that the player/user can change the audiovisual elements on a computer via motor action and the interface
- More elaborate simulation = more interactivity (not too sure about that...)
- We interact with the real world
- Agency/interactivity = making a difference in experience, not necessarily about actual change (as in the utopian view of interactivity)
- First-time players may experience a game as a linear, unfolding "route" or story, while experienced players may see a designed "map" of multiple possible linear routes (Grodal suggests this is mimesis vs art - but this seems like a questionable distinction)
- Linearity as fundamental to real world experience (causality as a survival mechanism)
- Simulation of freedom in video games
- All stories are a series of virtual forks, branches - games actualize this
- Games contain multiple stories, each linear (as experiential processes)
- Video games as "stories in the making"
- Aesthetics of repetition, learning
- Unfamiliarity/challenge -> mastery -> automation
- Games usually evoke flight-or-flight related emotions rather than passive ones
- Social stories/simulations "would be more attractive to women" (I've had several Sims families that would disagree with you there, Torben)
- Lyrical-associative experiences (procedurality? Most so-called artgames seem to deal in these kinds of experiences)
- The canonical first-person narrative experience is mobilized differently by different media/platforms
- "Untold" (experiential) stories vs "told" stories
- Grodal makes the naive assumption that only the latter can be understood as art (ie: only a designed experience/object can be art... how unimaginative!)