The complications that Rob offered are good ones, and I would add a couple more. To some degree, it's easy to assume that plot is a structure entirely contained within a text. To my mind, this is a difficult assertion to sustain, particularly with games. Torben Grodal's book _Embodied Visions: Emotion, Evolution, Culture and Film_ looks at narrative as a cognitive phenomenon tied to the biology of brain. His model for understanding this is extremely similar to many of the cognitive theories of perception and understanding that form a lot of HCI and interaction design work. To this end, I've always considered games to have plots (plural), even FPS games. Even if players aren't paying attention to the scripted moments that are supposed to drive the logic of the game's action, they're still experiencing some sort of cohesive thread that connects events. These will vary to some degree, if only slightly. I've never done it because it's outside my research focus, but I've been tempted to ask players to write narrative descriptions of the in-game events they experience, and then do a discourse analysis that codes for similarities and differences in the narratives that compares those reports to the in-game events themselves. For me, it would be a matter of looking at how different technologies impact player experiences. PC vs console. Keyboard/mouse vs light gun vs controller. How those experiences are embodied during play and afterward. But, I can see this as a way to start to tackle the issue of narrative/plot perception during gameplay. -- Dave Jones PhD Student Professional Writing and New Media Old Dominion University Chair, SIGDOC ODU djone111@odu.edu Message: 8 Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2010 11:16:38 -0500 From: Jordan Lynn <jordanl@uga.edu> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] Plot retention rates in AAA titles Message-ID: <AANLkTikh7_7XENWgCKz4wA7twZSLVL_giL0gxnSY2i5O@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Good afternoon, everyone! I have a question, and this group seems like the place to ask. What level of plot retention would you consider to be average in a First or Third-Person Shooter? Studying AAA titles for plot retention is difficult, since there are several subsets of gamers that ignore plotlines as a matter of course, and shooters aren't usually noted for narrative depth. My primary issue is figuring out what percentage of gamers are ignoring the plot, and what percentage are not getting it because the game is not delivering it effectively. Also, there is some difference between total narrative comprehension and getting "the gist" of the game's plot- what percentages of players would you expect to fully understand the narrative, and what percentage understand the basics of the story? Thoughts? -Jordan ------------------------------ Message: 9 Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2010 11:38:52 -0500 From: Rob Baron <baro0033@umn.edu> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] Plot retention rates in AAA titles Message-ID: <4CC5B29C.4040400@umn.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Jordan, That's an interesting question, especially when you consider that the single-player (more plot driven) portion of many FPS is a small part of the overall game-playing experience. I don't think it's necessarily a matter of the retention of a game's plot, or ignoring the plot of a game, but rather how much players engage with that plot as part of their overall gaming experience. For example /Call of Duty: Modern Warfare/ has a much bigger presence as a multiplayer community than as as a single player game. I would argue that this multiplayer portion has more to do with pure ludic experience rather than a narrative experience of the single player campaign. I think the question has more to do with the number of player that want to engage with a FPS's plot as opposed to the effectiveness of that plots presentation, especially considering that some of the earliest examples of this genre only used plot as a way to set up the "shooty parts" of the game. You could look at the extent to which players engage in single-player portions of a FPS to try to assess this. I'd also be careful of lumping all FPS games together. I know that there are a number of games that put a premium on plot and totally eschew multiplayer gameplay (like /Bioshock/). You may want to specify the kinds of FPSs that you're looking at. -- Rob Baron PhD Candidate and Graduate Instructor Rhetoric, Scientific and Technical Communication Department of Writing Studies University of Minnesota-Twin Cities