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Myth, Diegesis and Storytelling in Perennial Games

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Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13762))

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Abstract

Perennial games—ongoing, live games—are a form of games that often seem at odds with storytelling through their temporality, repetition and strange diegesis. This paper proposes a reframing of storytelling in perennial games as myth to alleviate these problems. Two layers of myth are presented, the first as the constructed fictional layer, and the second as the lived experience of the communities and people engaging with the game. This avoids the traditional player/author split, often seen as problematic in perennial games, by not focusing on authorship or control of these layers. Rather, it focuses on what each layer is affecting about the experience, how both authors and audience can engage with each layer, and how these layers affect each other. Three additional problems with perennial storytelling are identified that this reframing as myth helps alleviate. Framing the play of perennial games as myth shows how players are a part of a greater mythological experience in a disenchanted world. It explains the repetitive nature of perennial games as re-enactment and ritual, instead of as a logic-breaking repetition of story events. Furthermore, mythology has an inherently complicated relationship with truth and fiction, and this fits naturally with a similar relationship of perennial games and diegesis. Through this recontextualisation, we can improve understanding of how players are experiencing and engaging with perennial stories with a holistical understanding of their play and development.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As defined by Eliade [19, p. 21] as stories that “tell how the world was changed”.

  2. 2.

    Story is here seen in the perspective of Abbott and Ryan [1, 72], as a series of events, in contrast to a narrative, which is these events told through a discourse. A told myth is thus a narrative, and carries with it discoursal properties.

  3. 3.

    Authors are here seen as part of the community. See Sect. 3.1.

  4. 4.

    Here, Sicart’s broad notion of play [77] is useful, as it encompasses the wide-ranging possibilities of play.

  5. 5.

    One useful comparison to emergent narrative here is James Ryan’s notion of emergent narrative as nonfiction or lived experience [70], as the case is similar: These are both stories created (curated) from a wealth of material events.

  6. 6.

    Esports could be viewed as its own mythology, as a sports narrative on its own, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.

  7. 7.

    “Retroactive continuity”: Changing a previously established truth about the world to serve a new narrative purpose. This could be innocuous, like changing the previous off-screen location of a character, to severe, such as reviving them from death.

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    Bjarke Alexander Larsen & Elin Carstensdottir

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Larsen, B.A., Carstensdottir, E. (2022). Myth, Diegesis and Storytelling in Perennial Games. In: Vosmeer, M., Holloway-Attaway, L. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13762. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_41

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