Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology

7 On Absent Carrot Sticks

173 7 On Absent Carrot Sticks The Level of Abstraction in Video Games jesper juul Here is a naïve question: why am I not allowed to cut a carrot into sticks? Figure 7.1 shows the action of chopping carrots in Cooking Mama (Office Create). In this game, the player is tasked with preparing, heating, and arranging ingredients according to the recipes that the game provides. While we expect to perform all of these actions in a kitchen, we can also list an infinite number of other actions that are possible in a regular kitchen but not here. Cooking Mama lets us slice the carrots, for instance, but not make them into sticks. In a regular kitchen, moreover, we can decide that we do not want to cook after all and order takeout instead. At first, these may seem like mere technological limitations, but I argue that they derive from the fact that we are dealing with a game. Finally, Cooking Mama offers us something that we do not regularly experience— namely, an infinite supply of replacement ingredients whenever the player burns or otherwise spoils the food (see figure 7.2). Fiction plays a different role in different video games. Some games are abstract (e.g., Tetris [Pajitnov and Gerasimov]), others have a thin veneer of fiction (e.g., Angry Birds [Roviio Entertainment]), and others feature elaborate fictional worlds with character development and plotlines (e.g., Mass Effect 2 [BioWare]). Given that games by definition allow players to influence the course of events, thus contradicting many definitions of “narratives,” I find that it is preferable to discuss video games using the broader concept of “fictional worlds.” Since a fictional world may or may not contain a fixed sequence of events, the concept of fiction is a more precise tool for examining video games than is narrative. This concept also lets us see that video games are half real, meaning that they are an intersection of two quite different things—real rule-based activities that we perform in the actual world and fictional worlds that Fig. 7.1. Slicing carrots in Cooking Mama (Office Create 2006). On Absent Carrot Sticks 175 we imagine when playing (Juul). All content in a representational game will therefore fall into one of three categories. 1. Fiction implemented in rules: The most straightforward situation, where the game rules are motivated by the game’s fiction. We expect to be able to chop a carrot, and the game lets us do it. Other examples would include cars that can drive, birds that can fly, and so on. 2. Fiction not implemented in game rules: When fiction suggests a possibility that is not accessible to players. We generally expect to be able to leave a kitchen and to cut a carrot in any way we like, but the game Cooking Mama prevents us from doing so. 3. Rules not explained by fiction: When rules are difficult to explain by referring to the game’s fiction—for example, the way Cooking Mama gives the player unlimited replacement ingredients or the multiple lives characters experience in arcade games.1 Figure 7.3 illustrates these categories in a Venn diagram, with some game elements only represented in the game rules, some only represented in the fiction, and some being represented as both rules and fiction. The left side of the diagram covers amusing examples of video game rules that are not explained by fiction, such as Cooking Mama’s infinite supply of ingredients, the three lives of Mario in the traditional arcade game, Fig. 7.2. Burning all the cutlets but receiving infinite replacement ingredients in Cooking Mama (Office Create 2006). 176 Juul or even the source of the money given to players when they pass Go in Monopoly. I have discussed such examples elsewhere (Juul 5). In the following discussion I focus on the game elements on the right—that is, on the level of abstraction that distinguishes between the aspects of the game fiction that are implemented in the game rules (middle overlapping section of the diagram) and the aspects that are not (right side of the diagram). Like all nonabstract games, Cooking Mama has such a level of abstraction. The game presents a fictional world, but the game rules only give players access to certain parts of this world and only allow players to act on a certain level. Game design abstraction can be illustrated...