Gerard Genette writes in his Narrative Discourse that “the temporality of written narrative is to some extent conditional or instrumental; produced in time, like everything else, written narrative exists in space and as space, and the time needed for ‘consuming’ it is the time needed for crossing or traversing it, like a road or a field. The narrative text, like every other text, has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading” (Cornell 34). In this brief quote, Genette displays the complex relationship between the internal temporality of the text and the external, phenomenological temporality of reading/hearing/viewing. In the elder forms of narrative (the spoken and the written), the connection between external and internal temporality were, just as Genette explains, fully metonymic: the narrator is forced to explain to the reader what sort of time has elapsed in the internal textual world, as opposed to the time-elapsing experience of the reader: “Two weeks passed before they met again.” Of course, this narrated duration does not always err on the side of the novel; I have spent weeks of experiential time attempting to get through one interminable dinner-party with the Arrowpoints.
In contrast to this phenomenological experience of the reading of a novel (time is passing as I read this description of time passing), the video game ties together experiential and narrative times. Rather than existing in a dual (and dueling) temporality, the video game assumes a single time, the experiential time, and fills it with two distinct phenomenological experiences: the experience of playing the game, and the experience of spending time in the narrative. Similar to film (and perhaps even more to drama), we experience the narrative as it plays out in the game. Yet, unlike film, which uses experiential temporality to supplement and strengthen narrative temporality, the video game actually denies the distinction between these forms of time. This effect is most obvious when dealing with “non-narrative” games, such as Tetris. The user takes the position of both narrator and main character, experiencing the “narrative” of the game from beginning to end in real-time, explicitly bound by the rules of experiential time.
Some would argue, of course, that I am slicing salami, choosing non-narrative games to make an argument about narratology. However, the phenomenon of shared time occurs just as naturally in the game-play experience of the most highly-narrative RPGs. (For the sake of clarity, I should note that I disregard cut-scenes and FMV from my discussion of the video game experience; I believe that such devices are merely patches of film transposed into the game experience. The game itself only occurs when the player is ostensibly in control.) Imagine playing Bioware’s Dragon Age, a game that I am enjoying greatly right now. One of the earlier levels, the Tower of Ishal, follows your party as you fight through a tower to light a signal fire, culminating with a battle with an ogre (yes, I feel very dorky writing that). If we play through that entire level, we experience the temporality of the narrative at the same pace that we are experiencing the temporality of the narrating; i.e. the narrating takes just as long as the narrative, they share the same temporal space.
One might contend, however, that this is similar to filmic time, where some scenes are designed to replicate real-time, while others mere metonym of time. This, of course, would match up with the previous distinction between play-time and cut-scenes. However, that comparison only holds water if we assert that each run through the Tower of Ishal represents an identical narrative, in the same way that each viewing of Casablanca tells the same story. However, when we examine the phenomenological experience of the playing of a game, we recognize that each time we hit the reset button and run through the same narrative, from the base of the tower to the ogre at the top, slightly different events occur. In fact, the eidetic nature of the gaming experience is wholly unique on each play through. The first time I played the battle with the ogre, it took me ten tries, and when I finally succeeded, I was down to my last character, and had burned through all of my healing potions. The next time I ran the level, I easily burned the boss down, without batting an eye. Are these the same narrative? The first time, my main character died during the battle, with one of the minor NPCs finishing off the beast. The second time, Alistair, a secondary, but important, character dealt the killing blow over the shoulder of my hero. Amazingly, each of these narratives is wholly unique, and impossible to re-experience (as opposed to film).
