Cyberdrama

            Cyberdrama is used to discuss a new type of storytelling and a new type of story that is emerging, as the computer is now an expressive medium.  The term emphasizes “the enactment of the story in the particular fictional space of the computer” (Cyberdrama).  Cyberdrama must give human participants an experience of agency, which basically means the participant’s actions must have an appropriate and understandable impact on the world the computer presents to them.  Many authors continue to work actively on the design and development of cyberdramatic experiences because “they and many others believe that a large number of new medias most successful creations incline toward cyberdrama” (Cyberdrama).  Cyberdrama exists as a powerful force of imagination.

            The digital medium is well-suited to gaming because it is procedural, which means generating behavior based on rules, and participatory, which allows the player as well as the creator to move things around.  Also, “it is a medium that includes still images, moving images, text, audio, three-dimensional, navigable space – more of the building blocks of storytelling than any single medium has ever offered us.  So gamemakers can include more of these elements in the game world” (Cyberdrama).  Games and stories also have two important structures in common, which are contest and puzzle.

“Game-story means the story-rich new gaming formats that are proliferating in digital formats: the hero-driven video game, the atmospheric first person shooter, the genre-focused role-playing game, the character-focused simulation” (Cyberdrama).  These examples are all very storylike and use cyberdrama.  Game are always stories.

An example of a game that I play all the time is The Sims, which I play on the computer or in a video game.  The Sims is a strategic life-simulation video game where the player creates and performs the daily activities of one or more virtual persons in a suburban household near SimCity.  The Sims game is a contest, which is “the meeting of opponents in pursuit of mutually exclusive aims.  It is a structure of human experience, of course, from parenting to courtship to war, and as a cognitive structure it may have evolves as a survival mechanism in the original struggle of predator and prey in the primeval world” (Cyberdrama).  It is a contest rather than a puzzle, which is the challenge to the mind, where the pacing is often one of open-ended rearranging rather than turn-based moves.  Most stories and most games, electronic or otherwise, include some contest elements and some puzzle elements.

I am engaged as an author in the story as I create what happens in the game and what each character does each day, what their friends and family look like, and even what the house that they live in looks like, as well as the outcome of the game.  I control the actions and moves of the player.  I am limited in a way by the creator of the game because I can only do so much in the game to make it my own story with my own outcome, based off of the guidelines that the creator did or did not put into the game.  The person of the narrative is the virtual character(s) that I create in the game that perform the daily activities and make the story what it is.  “Cyberdrama must give human participants an experience of agency.”  This means that “the participant’s actions have an appropriate and understandable impact on the world the computer presents to them” (Cyberdrama).  “Agency is the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the world whose effects relate to the player’s intention” (Cyberdrama).  Agency is incorporated within my example of The Sims game because the game does give the participants and players an understandable impact on the world that is presented to them within the computer game.  This is because the player completely impacts the world in the game, as they control everything that happens from what the characters in the game look like, do every day, wear every day, and even where they live.  The game also leaves the participant with the feeling of empowerment as they take actions in the world effecting the players in the game, which is what agency is.

Immersion and transformation are other goals that must be achieved “through a combination of experience design, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence” (Cyberdrama).  The player is immersed in the game because “for immersion to take place, the characters in the world need to seem real to the participant.  This means that they need to be believable enough that the participant cares about them” (Cyberdrama).  “Immersion is the feeling of being present in another place and engaged in the action therein” (Cyberdrama).  This is certainly relevant in The Sims game.  The player is transformed in the game as well.  “The game experience allows the player to transform themselves into someone else for the duration of the experience” (Cyberdrama).  The game experience also “offers a multitude of variations on a theme.  The player is able to exhaustively explore these variations and thus gain an understanding of the theme” (Cyberdrama).  The player creates action through the performance of the characters within the game, while completely impacts the outcome of the game.  The player creates all of the characters actions, what they will do every single day, creating a story, that the player has complete control over, ultimately effecting and choosing the outcome of the game that the player desires.