The Working Narratives
Research + Projects = Viewpoint

Research Agenda

My research explores the phenomena of narrative. It looks at the history of children's literature and their experiences with stories as an enculturation process.  It looks to early print experiences and the characteristics it shares with narrative experience in new media such as games and provides a different perspective from which to consider the narrative experience. It considers the history of narrative structure and shows that for millennia we have enjoyed stories in a myriad of forms -- that what is called the "traditional narrative structure" is anything but traditional.  Different types of narrative used for centuries, from oral epics to written interlace romances, represent our human process more appropriately than does climactic plot. Used as the normative baseline for research on narrative in all fields, unqualified acceptance of "traditional" structure as a norm has limited exploration, particularly in new media, and must be questioned.

Narrative's documentation begins with Homerian epics of about 800 BCE. Its most recent iteration is the texts of video games. What do these two have in common? Both have to do with people representing themselves and their culture through story. Both have to do with passing these stories on through media that were prevalent at the time.My research takes as its focus children’s story experience in print and games. Its purpose is to show the importance of connecting the two.

It is understandable that in Homerian times stories used rhyme and cadence as aids to remembering. In an oral culture, a bard recited the epic stories that his audience called for. Each subsequent era saw the form of stories undergo shifts and moves that reflected different way of thinking. A culture of reading was already in place when the printing press introduced mass print production. It fed the interests of a population already desirous of stories. In the fifty years after Gutenberg’s invention, eight million books had been printed, “more than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330.” Rhyme and cadence were no longer necessary, and “the collective memory was transformed,” as an explosion of print fed the literate, and whetted the appetites of the illiterate, so that learning to read became paramount in importance. Unlike their parents, children did not have the same urgency to become literate. A measure of pleasure was found to be a remarkable inducement for encouraging literacy, and became the ideology still driving education and publishing today. Books became more entertaining; the literacy experience began to include material objects such as movables. Reading our culture’s stories became a truly hands-on, interactive experience.

With the growth of literary criticism, and the need for schools to have standardized formats, literary structure was concretized as the convenient narrative arc. This structure, which had been rediscovered by Freytag, and augmented with a climactic element, found its perfect form in the Conan Doyle mysteries of the time. Other literary structures continued to evolve and maintain a strong presence in writing throughout the twentieth century, despite the educational system’s adoption of narrative arc and climactic plot as its norm. Children younger than school age were unaware they were suppose to see narrative as a linear, sequential, temporal, and climactic plot. They benefited from children’s authors’ disregard of formal structure. Children learned to love story by playing with it: by singing it, tossing it in the air, coloring it, pretending to be in it, and by listening to the same bits, and looking at the same pictures, a hundred times.
Ah, but the story moves through genres… a hop and a skip and its in film, then television, video, and finally, on the express train of video games. Did it make it whole through these transitions? Or like Ron, Harry Potter’s friend, did it get “splinched” when it “apparated” into a new media environment?

Stories had a good start in the digital world with The Voyager Company bringing new ideas to book presentation on CDROM in the late 1980s. As the video game industry became a behemoth, it shouldered smaller genres out of the way. To find a niche for themselves, story publishers moved to edutainment. In doing so, they subverted stories to new purposes – teaching math, science, and writing. On the web, children’s narrative remained mainly true to its print text heritage; it has not yet attained the creative approach of adult eliterature. The video game industry had the potential to make story engaging and pleasurable in the new paradigm of digital environments. The move towards the first-person shooter as a predominant genre, and the reliance on the familiar schemata of arcade-action or a hunt-quest theme, left little to explore in a story. Action adventure and fantasy now predominate while other story themes are lost to this genre. Tendencies to violent action, and other anti-social behaviour, taints the stories imbedded in many games.

One of the reasons for the loss of variety is the assumption that stories are based on traditional narrative structure, and the only way games can accommodate this structure is in limited inflexible ways. If we see traditional narrative for what it is, a fairly recent upstart, and if we look at young children’s experience of story before the schools channel and structure it – when stories are as much activities as they are text (like games) – perhaps we can find characteristics of story experience that can be applied to making better games.

Children bring a perception of narrative with them when they come to play a narrative game. This perception is built up within a social environment through a variety of auditory, visual, and physically interactive experiences with print narrative from a very young age, often from birth. It constitutes their narrative understanding and the gestalt they bring with them to playing narrative games. For the most part, our appreciation of how young children in preschool and kindergarten perceive narrative is based in our adult experience and perception. It has been shaped by our assumption of a narrative structural norm: the traditional narrative arc. But children’s perception of narrative is formed before they are introduced to the formal concept of traditional narrative structure in elementary school. It is only in their primary years that they are encouraged to become efficient “silent readers,” to recognize traditional narrative texts and structures, and to become proficient in using these in reading and writing. My observations led me to think that this traditional structural norm is superimposed on an earlier perception of narrative that may have more relevance to children’s experience with games and one well worth exploring. This site explores this idea and more.

Dissertation Abstract

(Exerpts from PhD Dissertation:Characteristics of Early Narrative Experience: Connecting Print and Digital Game: SFU 2007)