Henry Jenkins, in Game Design as Narrative Architecture, speaks of four categories of videogame narratives, which he would summarize as “evoked”, “enacted”, “embedded”, and “emergent”. They will serve as the theoretical basis of my following observation as I attempt to discuss what Tacoma’s narration involves, and how that narration then poses a challenge, a demand for clarification and expansion, to Jenkin’s categorization.
One way to look at Jenkins’ analysis is that he has put his four categories in a specific order, which is in accordance to the player’s room of participation in constructing (or reconstructing, as in the case of the embedded narrative) the game’s narrative in each of them. The least of that capacity would lie in the evoked narrative, and the most would be in the emergent. In my analysis, I would turn the order around and start from the emergent, which can immediately be ruled out of any connection with Tacoma. Jenkins’ defines the emergent narrative as one that is “not pre-structured or pre-programmed, taking shape through the game play” (Jenkins, 11), encouraging “story-constructing activity of players” (15), but apparently the game does not grant us players the freedom to create our own narratives.
On the other hand, we can definitely see the embedded narrative at work. In Tacoma, the protagonist, Amy, is able to connect with the space station’s AR system to experience the interactions between the crew from the angle of a spectator. Those interactions are an indispensable element in reconstructing the fates of the station and its crew. However, whether or not players want to enter those experiences, or which specific experiences they wish to enter, is entirely at the discretion of us players. Similarly, we also have the choice in whether we want to view the personal information about the crew through the AR videos.
The AR function transforms the space station into literally what Jenkins would call “a memory place” (13) with plot elements that must be actively discovered and relived by us. Although no effort is required on the part of the players to enter into those slices of the crew’s lives, and viewing any of those is certainly not required to complete the game, we are nonetheless presented with a choice; exactly because of that, one might even say, does our choice to touch into them makes the embedded narrative function.
Similarly, characteristics of the enacted narrative also operates inside Tacoma. The beginning (our arrival at the station) and ending (we leave with the AI) of the game’s narrative are without a doubt predetermined. But as mentioned above, we have complete freedom in expanding our knowledge of the crew in between. The question here is, whether the knowledge we acquire are meaningfully influential enough to be considered part of the plot.
One, after finishing the game, is free to argue that whatever we are able to know matters little to what has actually happened, and so, our actions do not affect the progression of the plot whatsoever. If the “plot” of Tacoma is defined as what the crew has done before Amy comes, this view would of course be reasonable. Another parallel perspective, however, might be born out of projecting our own feelings and opinions about the knowledge we receive on to the Amy, something we are prone to do as first-person simulation game players. If we then take the entirety of Amy’s experiences onboard the station — including whatever emotion and judgement we would give to our respective “Amy’s” — as part of the plot, then what we (and consequently, she) have experienced shall have a major effect on the progression of the narration. A more direct way to envision this is to imagine the game as a play, with lines of “Amy saw…”, “Amy thought …”, “Amy believed that …” being generously added into its script. Should we adopt this view, then, the game would definitely exhibit elements of the enacted narrative.
While the above two modes of narrative can be attributed to Tacomain a quite straightforward manner, the final one, the evoked narrative, poses a challenge. In the way Jenkins’ defines it, an evoked narrative must “draw upon our previously existing narrative competencies” (6). Straightly put, for such a narrative to be active in a videogame, we as players have to be exposed beforehand to the world the videogame is trying to create. In his example of the Star Warsgame, he pinpoints the player base as those who “already know the story” (6). At first glance, this seems to be out of the question with Tacoma: the game is not reproduced before in any way, shape, or form, nor is it directly drawing from other works; a real-life experience is even more absurd — I doubt if any portion of the player base has the experience of floating in a space station, being bossed around by an AI, in the year 2088.
But does this necessarily mean that Tacomais conceptually incompatible with the evoked narrative? Can we actually create a videogame — or anything else — that we are completely unfamiliar with? I would rather argue here that all of us are familiar with Tacoma: perhaps not in the aspect of space life and technology, but in the heavily pressured atmosphere of the crew’s working environment, in their futile attempts to bargain with a monstrosity of capitalism that both fully controls them, knows them, and treats them as immediately-replaceable tools, and in their desire to find their places in that twisted society.
Using Jenkins’ spatial view of games, Tacomais packed with those themes, be it in the crew’s experiences in their work, in their horrific lack of privacy, or even in the company’s attitude towards Amy. With all the science aside, the game is playing out the outcome of capitalism to its extremes, and that, I bet, is something most of us have feared.
So what does that say to the term “evoked” narrative? Simply put, it needs clarification. The environment in which it functions, a “familiar world” (12), needs a definition. What does that mean? Does that have to be a fictitious one we have experienced through books or movies? Or should that be limited to the world we players already live in? Won’t our identification with some of the themes a game covers be sufficient? And therein comes the expansion of the idea of “evoked” narrative, a possibility Tacoma more than hints at.
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