Northrop Frye and the Story Structure of the Single-Player Shooter

Since their appearance in the early 1990s, shooters have become some of the most popular video games available: the science-fictional shooter Halo: Combat Evolved from Bungie Studios, for example, was the killer application for the Xbox console, and has sold about five million copies since its release in 2001. As their name suggests, these games are about shooting enemies and are often categorized according to the player's point of view: in a first-person shooter, the player views the game world from a character's subjective viewpoint; in a third-person shooter, by contrast, the player's view is objective and the character is visible onscreen. But a much more fundamental distinction can be made between single-player and multiplayer shooters. In a single-player shooter, the player's opponents are computer-controlled. In a multiplayer shooter, the player's opponents are controlled by other players. Nor do the differences end there. Most multiplayer shooters are gameplay-driven: play sessions consist of one or more matches, in which players compete with each other (either individually or as teams) to win the game, either by scoring points or capturing objectives. Most single-player shooters, by contrast, are story-driven: play sessions consist of one or more levels, in which the player is told the story so far and then must overcome a series of obstacles to find out what happens next. Each level is part of a campaign, and the player wins the game by completing the last level, concluding the campaign, and finding out how the story ends. Indeed, in the case of one popular and critically-acclaimed shooter, Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment, 2001), the story is told using three different media and three different narrative modes: graphic-novel panels, in-game movies, and voice-over narration. As a result, players will spend as much time watching and listening to the story of Max Payne as they do playing the game.

The question to be considered here is this: if single-player shooters like Halo and Max Payne tell stories, then what stories do they tell? What is the story structure of the single-player shooter? Scholars working in the field of computer game studies do not seem to have paid much attention to this question. Jonas Carlquist, for example, has compared the story structure of the single-player shooter to Joseph Campbell's theory of the hero's journey, but with disappointing results: "computer games borrow parts from the hero's journey," he concluded, "but they very seldom use all stages" (30). Paul Budra, by contrast, has used the work of literary critic Richard Slotkin to argue that single-player shooters all share a master narrative: the particularly American myth of regeneration through violence. "The games force the player to become the gunslinger," he argues, "to purify through violence, to reveal truth by stepping outside the bounds of genteel propriety" (11). Beyond this master narrative, however, Budra's discernment begins to falter: "No generalizations can be made about the kind of narrative that these games reveal," he says (10). Indeed, one of the most prominent figures in the field, Espen Aarseth, has written as if the stories told by video games do not even warrant serious consideration. "While many adventure games are clearly attempts at telling stories, cleverly disguised as games," Aarseth says, "the limited results they achieve (poor to nonexistent characterization, extremely derivative action plots, and, wisely, no attempts at metaphysical themes) should tell us that the stories are hostage to the game environment, even if they are perceived as the dominant factor" (267).

Guided by the work of literary critic Northrop Frye and using evidence from a dozen sixth-generation (6G) single-player shooters, this article will show that these games have told (and continue to tell) a type of story to which they are particularly well-suited as a medium. Single-player shooters are mostly romances—adventure stories in which the hero is superior in degree to other men and to his environment. (As opposed to myths, in which the hero is a divine being, superior...