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Workshop "Time and Space in Interactive Media for Children" A Field of Its Own: To Study Computer Games as an Independent Genre by Anja Rau
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The workshop was loosely
structured into three sections with concise presentations
and ardent discussions that ran over into the coffee-breaks
and through the evening. Section one contained three
presentations that were concerned with issues closely
related to the position-paper with the key-topics of
temporality, spatiality, and narrativity: Traudl Bünger
on temporal and narrative coherency in interactive
adaptations of three books for children; Kai Thompson on
spatiality and immersion; and Klaus Walter on narrative
pacing. Section two comprized three
presentations on space and one on temporal anomalities in
computer games: Randi Gunzenhäuser on endangered bodies
in digital spaces; Beat Suter on the creation and
appropriation of space in Unreal Tournament; Karin
Wenz on the creation and appropriation of space in
Wiggles; and Anja Rau on media-specific temporal
anomalies in games. The presentations in section
three were centered on children as "audience" for games:
Petra Wieler compared school-children's reactions to
narrated stories to their reactions to computer games;
Cornelia Rosebrock talked about the phantastic in printed
versus digital fiction; and Ingrid Tomkowiak presented an
info-fiction CD-ROM on the second World War. Traudl Bünger
(Universität Köln, Arbeitsstelle für
Leseforschung und Kinder- und Jugendmedien ALEKI) introduced
an adaptation of Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking
novels that combines game- and story-sections in an open
temporal structure. The absence of navigation guides in this
piece leads to temporal and narrative inconsistencies which
Bünger regards as typical of computer games. According
to Bünger, the "game"-concept is inherently exclusive
of an overall temporal structure that can fulfill a reader's
desire for coherence and narrative plausibility - the
interactive freedom characteristic of games has to be
sacrificed for the sake of an acceptable
time-structure. The ensuing discussion
already brought up two main foci of the workshop:
media-adequacy and the quality-debate. On the one hand, it
is questionable whether interactive texts can be approached
on a background of standards and expectations created by the
print-format, such as temporal consecutiveness or narrative
coherence. On the other hand, a CD-ROM that dates back to
1995 with all the technical limitations implied by this
date, seems to say more about the technological development
the digital medium has undergone since then than about the
medium's general capacities. Modern, "intelligent" software
can easily avoid temporal glitches (e.g. that a game does
not "realize" you have solved a riddle and asks you to try
again). Kai Thomson (SMS Demag AG,
Düsseldorf) spoke from the position of the
game-designer and made a case for entirely immersive and
life-like gaming-environments. In a computer game, "space"
serves as carrier and atmosphere of a world that should aim
at surrounding the player in a close-to-natural way as well
as at anticipating and adapting to the player's every move.
While technology is evolving towards fully immersive
environments of this kind, the participants of the workshop
voiced doubts whether this vision should be the only vista
for the future of games (and the only vista to be wished
for). This adds another aspect to the quality-debate, namely
the normativity of technological feasibility. Klaus Walter (Deutscher
Multimedia Verband, Düsseldorf) presented an analysis
of the different narrative sectors of computer games. In
games, claims Walter, narrative and ludic parts alternate to
create a symbiosis of interdependent elements. Walter shades
the ludic parts as necessary acts of decision that serve to
further the (more dominant) narration and trigger a cut
scene with the filmic rendering of the next part of the
story. This strict differentiation between sectors that
require player-activity and sectors that tell a story
started a discussion about the narrative quality of games in
general: While most discussants accepted narrativity as a
valid concept in the analysis of games, the group was split
between those who seek an a priori narrative quality in
games and those who see narrative as emergent or even
created by the reader in the act of playing a
game. Randi Gunzenhäuser (TU
Chemnitz, DFG-Forschungsprojekt "Interaktion mit fiktionalen
Hypertexten") started the second section with a presentation
of the ego-shooter Max Payne, a game that uses
"bullet-time", a concept borrowed from the movie The
Matrix, not as a dramaturgic element but as a
game-function. Similar to the weapons a player collects and
uses during a shooter, "bullet-time" can be turned on or off
at will. Gunzenhäuser also showed how computer games
and especially shooters negotiate a threat to the body in a
realistic yet clearly virtual environment - a representation
of the endangered body that can be read as subversive
strategy in a wider sociopsychological
context. Beat Suter (Update,
Zürich) demonstrated a strategy for the appropriation
of space that is specific to computer games. While a classic
adventure like the Myst-series offers a richly
detailed gamescape for the reader to explore, the engine of
Unreal Tournament asks the player to first carve
rooms and landscapes from a darkened (and therefore
"filled") screen, thus creating a space for the game to take
place in. Space is created by taking away from a state of
entropy instead of by installing structures in empty space.
Turning real-life activities inside-out, games (or virtual
environments in general) create a new spatiality and with it
a new corporeality that is reminiscent of Gibson's
cyberspace and tangibly adequate to the carrier-medium, the
computer. In her presentation of the
Wiggles, Karin Wenz (Universität Kassel) seemed
to pull together the previous two presentations: In the
Wiggles, as in Unreal, space is created by
digging away from a more or less solid mass. But as in
Max Payne, the space not yet conquered holds danger
in the shape, not of heavily armed killers, but of monsters
that have to be slain for the darkness to be filled with
light and the "unsafe space" made safe. In a second step,
Wenz identifies time in Wiggles as cyclical, inspired
by the clock-metaphor of the controls and the fact that the
diggers regularly return to a central meeting place before
setting out for their adventures underground again.
Recursion (or recurrence), according to Wenz, is a, if not
the basic principle of comptuer games as it
determines both their programmed and their temporal
structure. Anja Rau (Blue Mars,
Frankfurt) is looking for time-stuctures in computer games
that are medium-specific and create temporal effects that
can occur only in digital literature. Unlike Walter, she
regards narrative and ludic elements of a game as layered
horizontally (as opposed to vertically, one after the
other), both present simultaneously but differently
emphasized at different points in the game. Discworld
I and Maniac Mansion II are both games that
establish a unidirectional time-line (pointing from past to
present) in their narrative and then require the player to
reason back in time in order to solve the riddles. According
to Rau, the clash of the actively immersive (ludic) with the
narrative layers creates a clash in their player's
conception of the game's time-line in a way that cannot be
achieved by a printed text. Petra Wieler (FU Berlin)
showed material documenting the reaction of second-year
school children to narrated stories and computer games
respectively. The narrative seemed to offer itself up for an
in-class discussion didactically structured in a way that
would lead the children to verbalize emotions and develop
empathy. Faced with a computer game, on the other hand, and
grouped in teams of three, the children discussed mainly
problem-solving strategies and their personal reactions to
the game rather than its contents. The ensuing discussion
questioned Wieler's interpretation that computer games do
not foster verbalization or the development of emotional
eloquence and that on top of this school-children today
lacked the media-proficiency needed to cope with computer
games. On the one hand, the two situations portrayed
differed structurally (a guided in-class discussion versus
an unguided, teamed, hands-on encounter) and were therefore
hard to compare. In addition, there are other studies (like
Sherry Turkle's in the US) that come to the opposite
conclusion, namely that the computer in general and
especially problem-solving tasks like those found in
computer games further verbal and communicative skills.
Cornelia Rosebrock
(Universität Frankfurt/Main, Institut für deutsche
Sprache und Literatur) outlined Todorow's concept of the
Phantastic which she regards as a central boon of literature
when it comes to a child's development of symbolic skills.
The Phantastic is to be found as a supernatural occurence in
an otherwise realist context - therefore not in fairy tales
and not in computer games, either, as the latter are
established as inherently unrealistic and unreal
environments. For Rosebrock, this is one of many instances
where the computer game fails as a narrative genre for
children - always provided that literature for children
should aim at developing their verbal, communicative and
emotional capabilities. Rosebrock's presentation rekindled
the debate on quality. It is (sadly) easy to find outdated
or plain bad computer games to prove any negative
presumption at all. However, in this continually
diversifying genre, it has become equally possible to play
"good" games that are both technically up to date and able
to tackle issues traditionally associated with literature.
It was not until the final discussion that this constant
measuring of computer games up against the paradigm of the
pre-postmodern novel was being questioned. Ingrid Tomkowiak (Kuratorium
Volksliteratur, Zürich), finally, presented a CD-ROM
project that is very obviously not a game, the French
production Operation Teddybär which combines an
interactive cartoon with background information about the
Second World War. While the cartoon uses interactive
features to expand its movement- and time-depicting
facilities, the informational part has ingenious navigation
aids that help the reader to find her way through story and
materials and to better relate both to each other. Tomkowiak
raised the question whether this work could be included
among "interactive media for children", as well and thus
broadened the scope of the workshop beyond games, at the
same time making it obvious that computer games form an
atonomous genre with genre-specific properties and need to
be studied as a field of their own. The workshop ended in a
plenary discussion that took up the central issues of the
past day: narration and/or game; space and time as
functional elements of games and movement as central
modality; the visual aesthetics of space in games; and the
question of "quality": can an apparent flaw be attributed to
the entire genre or put down to the failures of individual
specimen of a young and developing genre. The plenum also
noted the marked absence of gender-issues from the
discussion (apart from Randi Gunzenhäuser's
presentation.) The weekend was framed by
Melanie Kocher's presentation of Myst III - Exile and
Judith Mathez' presentation of Wiggles and by Susanne
Berkenheger's performance of two of her recent hypertexts,
Hilfe! ( The organizers had made a
point of inviting researchers with backgrounds in
gamestudies, game-programming and in literature for children
which meant that, even among the presenters, there were
people present who did not a priori agree that computer
games are among the most exciting representatives of digital
literature - or even that by putting "literature" on a
computer and creating works that are adequate to the medium,
it is possible to create "good" literature at all. This made
for a very lively as well as inspiring discussion and I
think everybody present came, at more than one occasion, to
the point where they had to start to reconsider their
presumptions. It's good to see that the German-speaking
literary / cultural theory-community has recognized computer
games as a specimen of digital literature to be reckoned
with and that this recognition takes place in a
debating-culture that thrives on healthy
controversies. |
