Ludology and Narratology in First Person and Second Life

While reading the first six essays in First Person, I began to find myself drawing on my experiences with participating in Second Life to help me understand the concepts of narratology and ludology.

I find Janet Murray's essay "From Game-Story to Cyberdrama" to be interesting because it delves into the question of whether there can be an actual existence of a so-called game-story. Can a game-story exist where gaming and story elements combine?

As Murray writes, "So perhaps the question should be, is there a game story? For me it is always the story that comes first because storytelling is a core, human activity, one we take into every medium of expression, from the oral-formulaic to the digital multimedia" (3). I tend to agree with Murray. For me, the process of storytelling is a central activity that binds us together as a culture.

What Murray realizes is that as our modern culture relies increasingly on technology and our methods of traditional storytelling are bound to change because of the emergence of these new media technologies. What I am wondering is if this means that we will find the answer to discovering the key to integrating games and stories through the use of new media and technology. Murray writes that "We need a new medium to express this story, to practice playing this new game, and we have found it in the computer" (3).

I understand that storytelling, like games, has its forms, structures, and sets of rules. Essentially ludology is the discipline that studies games and play activities. I found Matthew Mateas's essay "A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games" to be interesting. Mateas incorporates elements of Aristotle's theory of drama with Murrays's aesthetic categories (immersion, agency and transformation) in order to better understand the ideal of the interactive story (Mateas 21).

By understanding what makes a story so appealing, I have been able to apply these elements to my participation with Second Life. I am aware of immersion, agency and transformation each time I log onto SL. Mateas states in his essay: "Murray suggests three ways of inducing immersion: structuring participation with a mask (an avatar), structuring participation as a visit, and making the interaction conventions (the interface mechanics) seamless" (26).

When I sit down at my iMac at home and log onto SL, I try to essentially forget about the computer that sits in front of me. I try to get beyond the fact that I am playing a game on a computer and focus solely on my avatar and what I want to accomplish in SL and achieve agency.

I understand that I am in control of my avatar's creation when I log onto SL. It is up to me to choose to actively particpate in creating my avatar's story. Out of creating my own "story" with my avatar, then I am essentially creating my own sense of agency. According to Murray, "Agency requires that we script the interactor as well as the world, so that we know how to engage the world, and so that we build up the appropriate expectations" (10).

Mateas writes"...that agency is a first-person experience induced by making moment-by-moment decisions within a balanced (materially and formally) interactive system" (27). When I log onto SL, I essentially am in control of creating my avatar's story, therefore I am the key to experiencing my own agency in SL.