Well, if you can't say something nice, then...
Submitted by lobster_king on Tue, 03/04/2008 - 22:31.
Oh dear. I knew there was trouble brewing when I first started to read Markku Eskelien's 'Towards Computer Game Studies'. "What's this?" asked my brain, "Complete and utter refutation of the narrative theory we've been studying, in relation to video games, which we've also been studying?!" What a mess. Jeez, it's just like an English/literature class to bolster your confidence in one theory or theoretician and then bring it all crashing down around you a few weeks later with the next name on the list. Except after four years of this, you start to realize that they're all right. Or they're all wrong. Really, they got some of it right, and they were just guessing at the rest. Anything to stir up some controversy.
Eskelinen makes some good points... emphasizing (his) difference between narrative and games - that the "user time and event time" of games is distinct from the "story time and discourse time" of narratives. But like most of the commentators on his work, I kind of agree that it's not so much that games 'are not narratives' or don't possess the conventions of narratives, but I think it is important that games are situated as a separate medium - despite their occasional similarity to (or incorporation of) print, hypertext, film, theatre, etc.
And I would have granted him and his arguments some more weight if I hadn't read the commentary, and moreso if I hadn't read his responses back. Douglas, Schechner, and Kucklich bring up some valid examples and arguments, which partly augment - and not strictly demolish - Eskelien's article. And they do it in such a manner: "Speaking from the perspective of a literary scholar, I can only say that the immigration of terminology and theoretical concepts from other disciplines is the best thing that ever happened to literary studies (Kucklich)." And what does Eskelien do? He responds with a surprisingly hostile attitude: "As Kucklich doesn't debate in a reasonable academic manner, he wouldn't even deserve a proper reply. [His] claims are both absurd and unfounded and in their ignorance more suitable to be published in the continuous amateur hour of Kucklich's blog than in any serious scholarly context (Eskelinen)." Yikes.
Maybe I should have seen this coming... Looking at 'Towards Computer Game Studies' again - and maybe I'm just biased and incorporating a hostility underlying the text that I didn't see before - there's that same attitude: "Luckily, outside theory, people are usually excellent at distinguishing between narrative situations and gaming situations: if I throw a ball at you, I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories." A little bit more dilute, since his aggression is aimed at a general audience (or theorists in general), rather than specific commentators who he can try to more personally offend.
Guess I'm just used to a kind of professional neutrality in 'academic' writing. I'm sure Eskelien would have a thing or two to say back to me (whereupon I'm sure I would go home and cry into my copies of Chatman, Freud, Bahktin, etc, etc). Just seems to me that insulting people isn't really much of an argument, much less any successful persuasion tactic.
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Ad hominem damages the paper's credibility
Eskelinen does have a few valid points, but he's obscuring a glaring flaw in his paper by inundating it with unnecessarily complex terminology, and then discarding all valuable criticism of his work with blatant ad hominem. Personally I thought it was rather arrogant of him, not to mention unscholarly.
Two longtime friends of mine are currently in the employment of Games Workshop and Icarus Studios: game development studios. They're both exclusively writers and content designers. They get paid to create characters and plots. Events and existents.
It seems to me that Eskelinen's argument, if valid at all, is an argument of semantics. His purpose is to prove that games are not narratives because strict readings of traditional definitions of narratives do not apply to games unless you adjust the definition. And adjusting the definition is apparently an example of feeble academics trying to fit a square peg in a round hole by "picking their favorite literary theories off the shelf" and trying to apply it to video games. It seems that Eskelinen has a very unscholarly axe to grind, or his argument wouldn't be so obviously riddled with holes.
I think most of us can agree to the compromise that *most* games contain elements of narrative, some more pronounced than others. It's hard to deny the narrative content of Zork, Prince of Persia, Grand Theft Auto, Legend of Zelda. On the other hand, trying to extract the narrative elements of, say, Tetris or Tic Tac Toe, would require a pretty decent stretching of the definitions of narrative, and even then, would return very little valuable insight.
Anyway, I sincerely apologize for the length of this comment. I do share your opinions on Eskelinen.