Narrative, Genre and Ideology in Video Games: an analysis of gender roles and structures of power

By Bruna Pickler

This book sheds light on gender politics and structures of power that can be found in new media, as a single structure that can be found in any game. This book brings to the public an academic dissertation, that was written to grant a Master's Degree to its author. It aims to produce knowledge regarding the modern video game medium by analyzing the narrative pertaining to one such game. To be written, a game was played and replayed to its whole extension, and analyzed throughout. The game is used as a contemporary example of the cultural form. The dissertation focuses on the narrative structure of the text using the theoretical work of Vladimir Propp and the ideas he develops in Morphology of Folktale (1968). This book argues that the morphology identified by Propp as being present in traditional folk narratives can also be found in a contemporary electronic cultural text. It also identifies and discusses issues regarding character development, the relationships between archetypes and categories, the allocation of tasks to the players within the story-as-game, the characteristics of the temporal development of the narrative, the significance and roles of the main characters, and the extent to which gender politics informs the narrative of this contemporary video game.

"The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.
― Roseanne Barr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Editora Dialética
• Release date: Jan 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9786525299709

Book preview

1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis aims to bring knowledge about one specific medium, the video game. Due to the recent technological evolution, this is part of our everyday life, and with the event of globalization it is likely that it will increasingly have a wide cultural impact. This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of the new and emerging media as a whole, through analyzing the narrative structure of the specific medium of video games: where the narrative is used to engage users, we expect to understand the impacts and how this medium contributes to the broad scenario of new media.

A specific game narrative will be analyzed. We will analyze the narrative of the video game and the ways in which it allows players to take an active role when constructing the narrative, in terms of where the game will lead the character and consequently the outcome of the game.

1. 1. CONTEXT OF THE RESEARCH

This thesis will explore narrative theory and how it can contribute to the analysis of video games, specifically throughout the narrative of Assassin’s Creed Revelations. We will analyze the narrative structure of this video game.

1. 2. KEY THEORISTS

We will refer to the work of Vladimir Propp, specifically Morphology of the Tale (1928), and his approach to the narrative’s structure, as well as other relevant theorists.

1. 3. GAP IN THE LITERATURE AND FUTURE RESEARCH

The gap in the literature is the under-explored area of the relation between narrative structures and the playing out of video games. Even thought the themes of narrative and video games have been widely studied as separate entities, the relationship between the two has not attracted the same level of academic interest.

2

JUSTIFICATION OF THE TOPIC

The video game, as a popular contemporary cultural form and genre, is one of the cultural sites and set of texts where established and normalized ideas and meanings (about gender, race, ethnicity, age, nationality) taken from various globally-connected social contexts, are represented, reproduced and often take on the form of ideologies. Ideology has been described as a hidden or disguised reality (Bouissac, 1998, p. 388) which, being repeated on an everyday basis, comes to be accepted as normal, unquestioningly true and a form of common sense. So ideas about the natural superiority of men over women, for instance, can be characterized as a form of masculine ideology that naturalizes the power relations between men and women. These ideologies are played out in various narrative forms, for instance where men are active and women are passive, or where women accept that their socio-cultural status is that of objects of desire for men. This dissertation will look at the ways in which the narrative threads, roles and functions ascribed to characters, and forms of value normalized and taken for granted in the video game being studied, can be seen as being ideologized. The argument, or at least the point of contention, is the extent to which certain types of cultural forms and genres reproduce socio-cultural ideas and values as ideologies, particularly in terms of how they arrange their narratives and, by way of extension, distribute narrative roles, tasks and functions. Propp’s work is an important part of this study because it enables us to analyze the action and characters within the video game in terms of specific categories (hero, helper etc) that can then be reintegrated into and used in the analysis of the video game as narrative.

3

LITERATURE REVIEW

3. 1. NARRATOLOGY

A narrative can be found in any piece of cultural work. According to the encyclopedia of semiotics, narrative structures are a sequence of events that follow a temporal and chronological dimension. (Bouissac, 1998, p. 437)

Narratology can be defined as the study of the invariant properties and the underlying compositional principles common to all narratives that characterize the storyness of stories and the narrativity of narratives. (Bouissac, 1998, p. 443)

The encyclopedia cites the work of Vladimir Propp in regard to his study, Morphology of the Folktale (1968):

"The ‘morphology’ he constructed for a certain kind of narrative was later called a grammar of the story or plot. ... With ingenious simplicity, he deduced that the actions of the