Narrative incompleteness as a meaning effect in video games

Abstract

If we take the term “narrative” in a broad sense, we certainly could not affirm that each and every video game is a narrative. Tetris, for instance, presents blocks that need to be organized in lines if the player wants to get points, and this obviously is not a narrative per se. Donkey Kong, on the other hand, has characters like a man, a gorilla and a princess in a conflict structure that creates a narrative with a beginning and an end. In spite of that, Jesper Juul (2005) considers that kind of fictional universe as incomplete – since we do not know where the princess comes from or how she was captured by the ape – and incoherent – because the main character has many lives available. This particular point of view has many problems since: 1) it implies that a game is a way of portraying a pre-existing universe, for, to be considered incomplete, it must have some degree of completeness beyond the content shown in the game; and 2) uses as means to measure coherence some elements that are alien to the video game genre, such as ones we may apply to our everyday life or the criteria we use to evaluate other art forms. We propose that the elements which Juul links to incompleteness and incoherence form the basis of the video game form itself, and thus can not render it incoherent nor incomplete – the sensation of incompleteness is a particular meaning effect, an artifice created by the link between a particular expressive mean and the narrative content, and a way of amplifying the fictional experience itself. Our argument is mainly based on French Semiotics Theory and on the works of Aristotle, Achcar (1994) and Murray (1997).