What's my motivation? Video games and interpretative performance

Abstract

The interpretation of character motivations is a crucial part of the understanding of many narratives, including those found in videogames. This interpretation can be complicated in videogames by the player performing the role of a player-character within the game narrative. Such performance finds the player making choices for the character and also interpreting the resulting character actions and their effect on the game’s narrative. This can lead to interpretative difficulties for game narratives and their players: if a decision to act is made by the player, is it that the player’s own imaginative reasons for acting warrant some narrative interpretations and exclude others? Also, lacking a script, how do players decide which such actions and imaginative reasons are warranted by the work? To answer these questions I argue that we need to investigate a) the interactive ontology of videogame narratives, b) the notion of game playing as interpretative performance, and c) the player-character, an artefact through which performance is focused in narrative games. Doing so shows there to be at least two problems with the notion of the correct interpretation of narrative games. Neither of these problems entirely negates the normativity of game narratives, however, and so players are left with the problem of how they might decide which of the possible playings are warranted. I end by making some practical suggestions for the thoughtful and narratively interested game player.