Abstract:
Players of multiplayer video games frequently come out of play sessions having experienced vivid and visceral stories that the original ‘authors’ of the text could not have anticipated. This is narrative emergence at work – a phenomenon that sees elements of game design and player actions combine during gameplay to create organic, unpredictable and highly variable stories. For players, these experiences can prove thrilling and are often remembered as defining narrative moments among countless hours of gameplay. However, narrative emergence takes on an ambiguous appearance in scholarship, suffering ill-definition, imprecise practical application, and dismissal as an ephemeral novelty. I re-position narrative emergence as a powerful form of player experience in multiplayer games, one which destabilises the ‘text’ of an individual game and makes its boundaries and meanings fluid and negotiable by players. This study analyses the ways in which collective gameplay generates experiences of narrative, as well as the narrative dimensions of players’ extra-game activities (including images, cinematic videos, walkthroughs, written stories and the production of other paratextual ‘artefacts’). The study of these narrative forms is balanced and deepened by an ongoing consideration of the role of various rulesets as contributors to complex systems of emergence. Through analysis of three case study video games and a digital ethnography of their associated online player communities, I demonstrate the potential for the phenomenon to form a fundamental part of everyday play experiences. Narrative emergence also develops as a phenomenon that is cyclical and recursive in nature, thus boasting enormous potential for shaping individual and collective understandings of game texts and gameplay over time. The study focuses in particular on games featuring zombies as central antagonists. The recurrent figure of the video game zombie, which mediates between chaos and rule-driven predictability, serves as both metaphor and mascot for narrative emergence. The zombie is by nature monstrously emergent, and this alignment is reinforced by the placement of chaos and contingency at the heart of representational construction in zombie media. In the zombie genre, emergent experiences are inherently located at the core of texts as a primary engine for narrative experiences.