Videogames, An Industry

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Breaking the Game:

the Traversal of the


Emergent Narrative
in Video Games

----Pedro Cardoso
ID+, Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade
do Porto | Portugal
[email protected]
----Miguel Carvalhais
ID+, Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade
do Porto | Portugal
[email protected]
-----

ABSTRACT

1 | INTRODUCTION

In video games the players actions shape the


narrative of their personal experience, molding what
otherwise would be a linear course. This emergent
narrative is in a state of constant transformation,
dependent on how the player influences it.

In video games, narrative emerges from a dialectic


relationship between the player and the system,
a relationship that makes the game progress. The
players actions determine the course of events and
thus the course of their personal experience.

This paper explores how the players traverse ergodic


media such as video games and how narrative
emerges from the interactions between them and
the system. In a previous text we have proposed
three types of traversal in video games (Cardoso &
Carvalhais, 2013): 1) that in which the player has the
ability to choose between mutually exclusive paths;
2) that in which the player has the ability to expand
the narrative; and 3) that in which the traversal is
determined by the disposition of the other actors in
the game world towards the player and each other.

Choice is at the core of video games, and by allowing


the player to choose, the game progresses. Without
the players input the game is on hold, it becomes
pure process, as stated by Alexander Galloway when
describing the ambience act (2006). The game
system requires the player to act in order to develop,
and to progress the narrative, no matter to what end.

This paper intends to further contribute by adding


another one: 4) a type of traversal that is rooted in the
exploitation of any flaws and glitches in the system,
allowing the player to traverse the game through an
overlooked side of the algorithm, journeying through
a world of unpredictable behaviours and events, that
may ultimately break the game altogether.
Keywords: Agency; Ergodic Media; Glitch; Narrative;
Video Games

Video games require the player to develop a nontrivial effort when engaging with them (Aarseth,
1997). Their actions determine their own personal
experience, or traversal, that may be defined as
the experience of travelling across something. In
this case we use the term traversal to define how
journeying through the game becomes a personal
experience. Traversal regards experiencing the
narrative that emerges from the interaction between
the player and the system (Cardoso & Carvalhais,
2013). It regards something that is more processintensive (Carvalhais, 2013) and less hardcoded;
the ludonarrative (Bissel, 2011), or Marc LeBlancs
emergent narrative (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). [1]

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Also, traversal in ergodic media such as video games


tends to not be easily re-experienceable (Bissel,
2011), as the conditions that created a specific event
or behaviour may not be recreated with exactness.
They may somehow be very similar, but still not
exactly the same.
These types of traversal define the dynamics of the
narrative experience of the game, even determining
the replayability of the game itself, and how open,
massive and (un)predictable the game world may be.
And eventually, how astray the player can go from the
games objectives and purposes, or even from what
was initially designed by the developers themselves.
By acknowledging the players experience, they
define the context that game designers and
developers will work on in order to produce the
algorithms that will govern that same game world.
Establishing the rules and boundaries of the paths
that allow the player to traverse the game, thus
settling how much of the play experience will be
determined by hardcoded, scripted events or by
procedural, emergent occurrences (Allison, 2010).
The types of traversal proposed result from different
forms of tension between these.
2 | TYPES OF ERGODIC TRAVERSAL
In Traversing the Emerging Narrative in Interactive
Narratives and Video Games (Cardoso & Carvalhais,
2013), we have proposed three types of ergodic
traversal: branching, bending, and modulating. We
will describe each, including a new type: exploiting,
that we are now adding.
2.1 BRANCHING
Branching happens when the player is asked to
choose between mutually exclusive paths, and is at
the core of ergodic works as the player is constantly
reminded of choices and paths not travelled (Aarseth,
1997, p. 3). Many video games make this very explicit,
even forcing the player to make moral choices. In
Bioshock (2007) and Infamous (2009) the player
has to choose between egotistical and self-centered
actions following a darker side of the narrative or
selfless and sometimes altruistic actions helping
others and thus embodying a sort of paladin or hero.
In Bioshock the player has to choose between killing
the Little Sisters and collecting ADAM (a valuable
item in the game) or helping them. In Infamous the
player embodies a character that possesses superpowers, and that has to choose between becoming a
super-hero or a villain. Along the game the player has
to complete multiple quests, and these challenges

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may promote one side or the other. Completing


quests from one side usually blocks the access to
quests from the other.
Silent Hill (1999) has several possible endings, which
the players may access depending on the course of
events along their traversal. Actually, the multiple
endings are so common in video games that players
already assume that different endings may exist,
even when that may not be true. One of the main
playable characters in Final Fantasy VII (1997), Aeris,
dies several hours into the game. This constitutes a
huge loss for the player, mainly due to the time they
have already invested on that character. Aeriss death
had such an impact that fans became interested in
finding a way for her not to perish. They intensively
searched for an alternative course of events, and thus
a different ending, although to date we still havent
found a way to prevent her from dying.
Branching is very evident in many video games.
Lets think about Super Mario Bros. (1985) although
many other games could be used as examples. This
game grants the player the ability to choose between
alternative paths. In the first level the player may
choose to ignore the pipes and keep heading straight
to finish line; but the player may decide to go down
one of those pipes into a room filled with coins [2]
only to go back up through another pipe, emerging
in a part of the world closer to the end, but now
unable to go back (to the left), to a part of the world
that is now inaccessible.
2.2 BENDING
Bending occurs when the player is allowed to
access different layers of information, increasing
her knowledge of the game world. When she is
able to explore optional non-mutually exclusive
paths (Miller, 2010), lengthening the game (Bogost,
2010) and even experiencing parallel narratives. As
games contain more than the player may experience
(Bissel, 2011), they may be curious and willing to
explore the intricacies and the details of its world.
Ian Bogost affirms that this is one of the major
differences between cinema and video games: If
edit is the verb that makes cinema what it is, then
perhaps videogames ought to focus on the opposite:
extension, addition, prolonging. (2010)
Thus, bending usually reveals hidden and/or optional
areas, items, behaviours, or actions. Games like The
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991), Final
Fantasy VII (1997), Grand Theft Auto IV (2008),
Borderlands (2009), Heavy Rain (2010), The Elder
Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) are just some examples that

use bending as a method to expand their worlds and


allow the player to engage in exploration. In these
games the player may not follow the main quest
or storyline which would lead to closure but
may instead wish to explore the open-world that
the game offers.
Open-world video games offer the player the choice
to engage in an immense range of optional activities
that do not necessarily contribute to closure, but
rather to expand the players experience. Actually,
the player may spend much more time exploring
optional content than on the main storyline or quest
trying to achieve closure.
Heavy Rain is not an open-world game but it allows
the player to bend the game as it constantly engages
them in side-activities.
Stories are about time passing and narrative
progression. Games are about challenge,
which frustrates the passing of time and
impedes narrative progression. (Bissel, 2011)
It seems interesting to allow the player to bend
the game, but undergoing in optional tasks has
its shortcomings. If bending doesnt contribute to
meaningful and engaging experiences it may become
a dull and painful chore for the player to undertake.
We may call these fillers, as they are features that do
not contribute to the overall experience of the game.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) offers one
example of this. The playable character may get fat
by eating fast food, and become slim when engaging
in physical activity. But, none of these features seem
to be meaningful when playing the game. Thus, we
question ourselves: why are they there in the first place,
and why should the player perform them? (Bissel, 2011)

and actions toward you. More importantly


perhaps, it will also affect the attitude of that
characters social network and thus the
attitude toward you that characters you may
not have even seen before will take. In this way,
if you affect a character in a positive way, their
friends may also have a positive disposition
toward you, and be willing to help you later,
or if you hurt the character, they might do the
same to you. (Games, 2011)
So, depending on the actions taken by the player,
many non-playable characters become friend or
foe. Actually, the players actions may reverberate
both favourable and dire consequences; they may
turn some characters to the players side and others
against him. For example, in the Grand Theft Auto
series if the player completes an assignment for some
gang, the rival gang (or gangs) may become their
enemies, and if she tries to travel through those gangs
territories they may engage the player as an enemy.
The Walking Dead (2012) is another video game
whose main feature is to force the player to engage
into meaningful social relationships. The storyline puts
the player in the role of an inmate that accidentally is
set free and forced to survive in a world full of zombies.
Occasionally, the player is forced to choose between
who lives and dies, and who eats and who has to wait,
etc. Most decisions will please some characters and
displease others, and the player has to manage the
dynamics of that social network, considering that they
must survive in a harsh environment.
So, here action actually becomes meaningful through
consequence (Games, 2011). It is the consequences
that are manifested through this social fabric that
give meaning to the players actions, that mold the
narrative, and that make the game progress.

2.3 MODULATING
2.4 EXPLOITING
Modulating is possible when the player is able to
craft relationships, and to regulate the disposition
of characters or actors in the game towards the
playable character and/or between themselves.
There is a social framework that can be molded as
the player acts within the game world. And what may
be honorable and righteous to a certain character or
actor may be nefarious to another. Fallout 3 (2008)
constitutes an excellent example of this, due to the
intricate social framework that links the games
characters and actors.
[Fallout 3s Karma system] works so that
every action you take to help or hurt others
will subsequently affect their disposition

Although the previous types of traversal are quite


different between themselves, they bear one thing
in common: they operate in a part of the system
that was planned, that was meant to be, that was
designed. As soon as we acknowledged this fact, we
started to ponder the possibility of another type of
traversal, an alternative way to experience the game.
A way that is unbound (or not exclusively bound)
to the side of the system that was intentionally
designed, but to that side that is dysfunctional,
emergent, and untested.
When players traverse a game by exploring glitches
and resorting to bugs in the system, we may say that

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they are exploiting it. Glitches are manifestations of


specific malfunctions within the system; they result
from unforeseen and unresolved problems, and
are something that was not supposed to be. Some
of these glitches may actually prevent the player
from progressing originating frustration and
disapproval and since they were not supposed to
exist in the first place, developers tend to eradicate
them over time. In fact, contemporary video games
often support online updating, allowing developers
to patch the system as a means to erase errors in the
code and to prevent system malfunctioning.
But glitches may also originate the opposite; they
may open a door to a new and unpredictable set
of possibilities for the player to experience. For
example, in Final Fantasy IV (1991) the player may take
advantage of a glitch in the system that will prevent
her from entering a town called Mist, the location of
key events waiting to take place. If the player skips the
town those events never take place and the narrative
of the game is broken, at least to a certain point.
At the beginning of Final Fantasy IV, your
heroes Cecil the Dark Knight and Kain the
Dragoon are sent to deliver a package to
the sleepy town of Mist. Once you get there,
the package detonates and sets fire to the
town. You meet a little girl named Rydia,
whose mom youve just killed. She summons
a monster to get revenge. Then Cecil blacks
out. He wakes up in a field on the other side
of the mountains. Kain is gone. Rydia is lying
nearby, unconscious. Cecil picks up the girl
and heads out into the desert.
By skipping Mist [Rydias hometown], we
skip that entire sequence. The package never
explodes. Rydias mom never dies. Kain never
leaves. And the whole game is broken as a
result. (Schreier, 2013)
In the earlier Final Fantasy games the players
abilities to explore the world map increase as the
game and its narrative progress. The player usually
starts by traveling across the world map on foot,
acquiring, later in the game, other means of travel
such as ground and water vehicles, or by riding a
sort of fictional birds called Chocobos. Traditionally,
much later into the game, the player is able to get the
means to travel by air usually through an airship
that gives her the possibility to journey to places
that were once unreachable.
Thanks to a glitch, in Final Fantasy VI (1994), the player
is able to acquire an airship way too early. This enables

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the player not only to further explore the game world,


but also to experience narrative sequences out of
order and witness other strange events.
But theres a hell of a lot you can do when you
have the airship this early in the game. You can
do story events out of order, break sequences,
and glitch out Final Fantasy VI in all sorts of
ways. (Schreier, 2012)
As, at that time, the player was supposed to be
constrained to a given location, the events in other
parts of the game world could not, in principle, have
been triggered. But when the player suddenly appears
in parts of the world where she was not supposed to
be in, the system assumes (sometimes) that the game
that should lie behind was already experienced and
tries to keep on developing the narrative, although
it could not make a more wrongful assumption. And
therefore, the game sometimes breaks.
In Tomb Raider (1996), the player can usually only
progress in the game if she finds a given key-item
that opens doors or gates that block her path.
Finding that item may be the motivation for the
player to explore the game world and to undertake
the sub-challenges that are eventually encountered.
But sometimes the player may manage to go
through those blocked doors without using a key.
The player just has to execute a couple of moves
with her avatar in order to be transported to the
next room. By doing so, some enemies may already
have been spawned in that specific room, but since
the door itself hasnt been opened, they are not
active and remain static, inert. This is an interesting
glitch that illustrates how the game system was still
not aware of the players presence. It is as if the
player has vanished from the games radar.
Some glitches can be found almost anywhere, but
some are bound to specific locations or events. In
Tomb Raider 3 (1998), there is a bug in the code
that allows the players avatar to move from the
floor straight to the roof. Players normally use this
to further explore the game, to reach inaccessible
areas, or at least not so easily accessible. In Super
Mario Bros. (1985) an unforeseen problem in the
code allows the player to jump on a Goomba (a
common enemy in Super Mario games) from below.
In other words, in a move that will surely kill Mario
(the games playable character), the glitch allows
him to not only to survive but also to kill his enemy!
Curiously, this glitch was first discovered when a
computer program was playing this game.
In The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with

Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel after that


it gets a little tricky (2013) Tom Murphy VII reports the
work he underwent in creating a software program
Playfun that plays Super Mario Bros. (1985).
He also published a video showing the program
learning how to play the game. At a given moment,
his program finds a way to kill Goombas jumping
from below. For a moment, he thought that was an
isolated incident, but the program started to use it
recurrently as a gameplay method.
Mario bounces off one Goomba up into the feet
of another. Not only doesnt he have enough
velocity to reach the platform, but hes about
to hit that Goomba from below. Believe it or
not, this ends well: Playfun is happy to exploit
bugs in the game; in this case, that whenever
Mario is moving downward (his jump crests
just before the Goomba hits him) this counts
as stomping on an enemy, even if that enemy
is above him. The additional bounce from this
Goomba also allows him to make it up to the
platform, which he wouldnt have otherwise!
(Murphy VII, 2013)
This raises the following question: Is this type of
traversal cheating? Is a player that is exploiting the
game cheating, or not? Was Murphys computer
program cheating? And can computer programs
even cheat?
3 | TO CHEAT OR NOT TO CHEAT?
In the world of video games, cheats usually allow
players to subvert the original mode of gameplay,
either by easing the gameadding extra lives is just
one exampleor just to achieve certain locations,
events, or obtain goods that they couldnt otherwise
get. Cheats usually are hardcoded in the system,
and many times they are development tools that
allow programmers to explore the game world
when they are working on it. Summarizing, they may
start as development tools and when they reach
the hands of the players they become cheats. So,
we may say that they are intentionally programmed
into the game system.
On the other hand, when exploiting the game, the
player is pursuing new fields of possibilities previously
unseen and unintentionally programmed into the
system, thus exploring the game beyond what was
previously established and tested. We may even say
that the player is aware of the game as a computational
system and that she seeks its frailties. So, now the
question is: can this be considered cheating?

Lessig has suggested that code is law, but


if code is law it is law as a management of
infractions. (Goffrey, 2008, p 19)
We do not think so. We believe that the player is
not cheating the game, but breaking it. We use this
term because the game may actually collapse! The
system may become unstable and crash, the player
may be prevented from progressing in the game,
as the sequences of certain events may be shuffled
resulting in paradoxes and other abnormal activities,
behaviours and events. Depending on the glitches
and how they affect the system, the traversal may
become rather unpredictable.
So, cheating subverts the ludological system, adding
changes to the original rules, to a mode of play, or
to the game state. Exploiting the game consists in
breaking it, in exploring the limits, the fallibilities
and shortcomings of the system that supports the
game itself without changing its rules. The glitches
were actually there all the time; they are part of the
system. But, the major difference is that cheats are
intentionally designed, and glitches are accidents. We
may say that they are accidental rules of the system.
The algorithm, which Turing understood as
an effective process for solving a problem,
is merely the set of instructions fed into the
machine to solve that problem. Without the
algorithm then, there would be no computing.
(Goffrey, 2008, p. 16)
4 | CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH
This paper pays a contribution by adding one
more type of traversal to the previously enunciated
(Cardoso & Carvalhais, 2013), a type that consists
in exploiting the game, in taking advantage of the
systems frailties, problems and inconsistencies, in
order for the player to explore alternative narratives
operating in a part of the system that is untested,
accidental, and not meant to exist. This fact makes us
wonder if there are more types of traversal that still
operate in a similar fashion. In other words, it makes
us wonder if there is a way of traversal that consists in
adding new elements, tampering or even hacking the
system, breaking the boundaries of the system itself.
Also, the discussion about whether exploiting the
game was or not cheating, raised another question:
Can cheating be another type of traversal? If cheating
is different from exploiting, can it consist in an
alternative way of experiencing the game? And how
does that differ from the other types of traversal?

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We find video games to embed multiple types of


traversal, but how those types relate in a specific
game is still to unravel. Understanding the relationship
between these types of traversal seems now even
more crucial to future studies on this subject. Grasping
the ways they relate with each other can provide us
with means to interpret differences between games
themselves, to understand the gameplay dynamics
they promote, and, ultimately, to unravel new and
innovative games, or at least alternative ways of
experiencing and thus designing them.
We believe that these types of traversal not only
contribute to a definition of the players personal
experience of journey through a given video game,
but may also provide insight on the experience of the
interactor while using other computational media, in
diverse fields of study from interactive media art to
user experience and interaction design.

Core Design. (1996). Tomb Raider.


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games, value and meaning: ETC Press.
Gearbox Software. (2009). Borderlands.
Goffrey, Andrew. (2008). Algorithm. In Matthew
Fuller (Ed.), Software studies: A lexicon (pp. 15-20).
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

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ENDNOTES
[1] Marc LeBlanc referred these terms at the 1999
Game Developers Conference.
[2] Coins are collectable items in the game, that if
enough are collected the player is rewarded with one
extra life, a chance to play again.
BIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Pedro Cardoso is a communication designer,
researcher, and a PhD student pursuing studies in
video games and new media. He is a guest lecturer
at the University of Porto.
www.pedrocardoso.pt.vu
Miguel Carvalhais is a communication designer and
a musician. He is a professor of interaction design
and new media at the University of Porto.
www.carvalhais.org

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